TPACK, creativity and friends @ Singapore

by | Friday, June 03, 2011

I have been in Singapore the past few days at the invitation of Mike Thiruman and his team at Educare. Educare is a co-operative of the Singapore Teachers’ Union and sees itself as serving “teachers and schools so as to enhance the quality of teaching.” I had two sessions with them on June 1 and 2 on Harnessing ICT towards transformative teaching and learning in the 21st Century. The first day was a presentation and the next day I presented a full day workshop to 35+ educators.

The sessions went really well and I have included below (for the record) the slides from both my presentations as well as some photographs I took both at the event and after. I would like to take a moment to thank Mike and his team (including Dr. Aksir Kumar and Richard Singh among others) for both inviting me to Singapore and hosting me for the past couple of days.

I also got to catch up with a couple of friends when I was here. One of them, Alfred Low, is someone I had never met, though we have known each other for a few years now. Alfred had contacted me a while back regarding his interest in TPACK and we have stayed connected by email and Facebook for a while. It was great to finally meet up with him. Here are the two of us catching up over a couple of beers.

I also met up with Aurobindo Ghosh a faculty member at Singapore Management University. Aurobindo (and his wife) were also at Urbana-Champaign when I was there as a graduate student. We met up again after 13 years… a lot of water has passed below the bridge in the meanwhile (my son was just two years old when I left UIUC). What was great how easily we picked up pretty much from where we had left off, 13 years ago!

Finally, a slideshow of photographs I took during my few days here.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The role of Vitamin D in beta-cell function

Who says scientists can't have fun. I just discovered a series of videos on (where else) YouTube about scientists expressing their doctoral research through dance!!! What can be cooler than that? Check out one of the winners: The role of Vitamin D in beta-cell...

Textbooks meet Bittorrent!

NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

Cyborgs are us!

Are we becoming cyborgs? William Saletan has a recent article in Slate titled Full Metal Socket about this issue. As he says: Cyborgs aren't studs from the future. They're old folks. As we age, our parts wear out. That used to mean immobility or death. Today, we can...

The intangibles of teaching

Jim Garrison and A. G. Rud have a wonderful article on TCRecord on Reverence in Classroom Teaching. Though, reverence may be "too exalted a word to associate with the practical and often mundane activities of teaching," it appears to me that ignoring these deeper...

The joy of learning: Of fire and trees and Dr. Feynman

Trees are some of the largest living things in the world. They can weigh tons. For instance the  One Oak Tree project measured and weighed a 222 year old Oak tree - and it's weight was 14.4 Tonnes (3.86 tonnes of which was dry weight). That's a lot of stuff! And this...

The Deep-Play Group & our robotic overlords

The Deep-Play Group & our robotic overlords

The Deep-Play research group started as an informal group of faculty and graduate students at Michigan State University, mostly my advisees. It has now grown to include Arizona State University and a couple of people there. Of course my advisees...

Representing DNA as code

What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children's books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel,...

Google, teaching & creativity

Mike DeSchryver and I recently presented a paper at AERA titled "Googling creativity: An investigation into how pre-service mathematics teachers use the Web to generate creative ways to teach." The abstract is as follows: This study examined teacher creativity and its...

Digital footprint

My colleague Leigh Wolf shared with me an assignment completed by one of her students (Allison Keller) in a technology and leadership class she is currently teaching. How one person's use of technology has changed over time. [Hosted on Flickr] Click on the image to...

1 Comment

  1. Alexa

    I came across lots of lecturers and teachers that do not use technology to leverage knowledge for students. Your post made me realized that even if we are in an advance technological era, some people really do not want to change and move forward. Very insightful article. Do you conduct seminars? please send me an email with details thanks

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