Innergy Awards 2010 and MOE ExCEL Fest 2010

Well, not often that I get to wear tie and formal dress, so this morning, bright and early, I got changed up nicely and set out to Suntec Convention Centre.
I had received notice from MOE that I was given a Commendation prize for the MOE Innergy Awards!

What had started out as a shot in the dark, had turned out to garner us a Commendation prize in the MOE Innergy Awards. Since 2006, we had started having a 'live' blog for our Sec 1 EDGE Orientation Camp. So last year, encouraged by Mr Low, I submitted an entry for the Innergy Award "Educating Students Outdoors, Engaging Parents Indoors- Using Mobile Content to Connect Teachers, Students and Stakeholders Beyond the Classroom"

I was shortlisted by the panel and gave a short-presentation on how we used mobile
3G phones and streaming content to allow parents at home to have 'live' updates of photos and videos of their child during our Sec 1 Camps. We demonstrated this by showing the panel a 'live' stream of CCA training at VS conducted by student leaders.

So it was a pleasant surprise to be notfied later on that our pet project that we had developed to engaged parents, had actually won a commendation award


Later in the day, our team of teachers headed by Mr Maran and comprising of Miss Tang Waiyue, Mr Chen Zhongyi, Mr Munir and myself, presented a concurrent sharing session to teachers attending the MOE ExCEL Fest on the VS Student Leadership Framework.

For the first part of the programe, we got the teacher participants to role-play and imagine that they were Sec 1 Victorians participating in our VS Sec 1 Orientation Camp. They would play the part of new Sec 1 students and we got some volunteers to be home sick, to be negative and some to be mere observers. We wanted them to experience for themselves how our VS student leaders would exercise leadership by conducting the team-building activity and managing them at the same time. The boys did really well and here's a clip of them in action:


Later on, Jia Lok and I did a small role-play to show the participants how we use our leadership passport to help our Junior and Senior Leaders take stock of their personal growth as leaders:


It was a long day but a fulfilling one and after we finished, several participants stayed back to chat with the boys and us to find out more. To me, that was a more tangible reward than the trophy we got in the morning- becaue through our presentation and subsequent dialogues with the participants, we did indeed show that Victoria is something more.

Nil Sine Labore