On December 18th, 2018, a geography teacher conducts an excellent geography class in our school, which is held on the same day as the visit of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Children's School Education Delegation. For the geography excellent class, our school specially invited a geography research expert, Mr. Liu, who is also an excellent teacher from Zhuhai, to observe the geography class with all other teachers of our school. The content of the lesson focuses on understanding the latitude and longitude of the Earth. With the use of different media such as HKT apps, tablets and Google Earth Pro, geography teacher Ms. Noel has designed three small activities for the students: The first activity is to use the given hints (e.g. distance, direction, latitude and longitude, etc.) to find the correct location of a pirate ship on the map of the tablet as a team. Through this activity, students can recall and apply prior knowledge, and be able to understand the importance of coordinates. The second activity was “Matching Geo-Terms”. Students explore latitudes and longitudes with Google Earth Pro as a group. Then, complete this activity on tablet individually, with discussion and sharing afterwards. The third activity is “Solve the Riddle”. Each student gets an opportunity to find the specific locations on Google Earth from the eight big computer screens in the two sides of the classroom. The fastest group that matches the coordinates given on tablet and solves the riddle wins! Students love this hand-on practice to apply their knowledge on coordinates. For the summary of the class, all students get a chance to answer questions on their big computer screen, and some can even write answers on the new big classroom e-blackboard as well. Students did a great job in completing all tasks in multiple activities, summarizing key points and expressing their opinions throughout the lesson.

The geography expert Mr. Liu gives feedback after the lesson. He appreciates how the geography teacher was always full of passion, appeal and affinity, the classroom environment was motivated and enthusiastic, all main ideas and challenging points were well and clearly explained, and was able to make use of all the most advanced equipment provided by the school. Students listened attentively and participated in all activities actively. They were good at critical thinking, able to learn and think independently, and the group learning strategy was very effective too. Moreover, he also mentions that the promotion of self-learning effectively improves students' understanding of the knowledge and their confidence in the expression of ideas with English as their second language. In order to improve teaching effectiveness, the school has constantly increased the investment on technological equipment, in a hope of improving students' learning efficiency to a certain extent and creating the most favorable conditions for learning.