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…

Ron Clark Academy, scalable?

Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant posted a video of a CNN story about the Ron Clark Academy and asked whether something like this was scalable? Watch the video as you ponder this question. Embedded video from CNN Video This is a question often asked of me,...

100,000

100,000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic8FHlawAdA Over the Memorial day long-weekend I just felt the need to create something to commemorate the 100,000 individuals, in the United States, who have lost their lives over the past few months to COVID19. That is a staggering...

Art is a lie… that tells the truth

Picasso famously said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." This design below is my attempt to represent this quote - at least the first part of the quote. Of course, as most things go, it is not clear whether Picasso ever actually said these specific words. But...

New media, new genres

There is an interesting article in today's NYTimes titled Content and its discontents by Virginia Heffernan. In this article she makes the argument the new digital, online media require new ways of representing information, new ways of thinking about how ideas are...

The future will not be a multiple choice test

From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows: Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to...

Blast from the past: Theories and memory

Ambigram for the word "Theory" by Punya Mishra My first real research study was one that I conducted back when I was a graduate student under the mentorship of Bill Brewer. It was designed as a classic educational psychology memory study and though I have done little...

Video Bingo in Alabama: Tech & change

How does technology change what we do? Often when a new technology appears we tend to see it in terms of existing practices and structures. So an e-book is the same as a book, except in digital format. E-books still have "pages" which we "turn" (with a flick or our...

Death & Taxes

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...

TPACK: A podcast

I just discovered a podcast about TPACK. The folks over at GenTech created a podcast back in September 2007. Check it out here or alternatively here. As they describe it, "In this episode of GenTech, the boys discuss the framework itself and how it may be used as a...

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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