Interactive whiteboards

More interactive whiteboards I've seen in a single place at any time. Practically every booth had one. It costs somewhere in the region of $2700, the price of a projector.





Interesting snippets overheard
"target set already or not?"
"PSLE results today.."
"256? Not bad!"
"tomorrow must all teachers go back to school?"
"got KPI?"
"next year I have Sec Three"

Lunchbreak

The chocolate éclairs are divine. I'm actually not the last one out of the hall this time so I don't have to go hungry or eat fried rice with mango pudding (which goes quite well together actually.. tastes a bit like turkey and cranberry sauce). I would take a photo of the éclair but I ate it already. Yum...

Active Learning through Gaming: Khoo

Dr Angeline Khoo is my prof! She teaches me Educational Psychology at NIE. And she's a WOW gamer too.

WOW terms—instances, mobs, bosses, guilds, quests—roll off Khoo's tongue just as easily as pedagogical terms. We even got to follow Prof Khoo into WOW and talk to her guild about thanksgiving. Heh. World of Warcraft and thanksgiving? Talk about disconnect. We even interviewed her former guild leader in character. The virtual world seems like a place where age, race, class don't matter. Her guild leader is only 21 years old but Prof Khoo salutes him. She says: "He asks me to jump into the fire, I jump!"

I think it is common to think of gaming, especially immersive role-play types, as a problem rather than an aide to education. We hear about "addicted" students who spend too much time playing games and never do any homework. But if we can take away our prejudices and look at gaming objectively, we realise that gaming does teach many real-life skills—problem-solving, decision-making, collaborating, etc.

Keynote 4: Emerging Trends and Impact on Education

Emerging Trends in Interactive Digital Media and their Impact on Education
By Leong Mun Kew



Wah, the real-time simulation of how fast a virus will spread in Singapore is cool. Leong showed a map with black dots in the central part of Singapore that spreads outwards. In 10 mins, 60% of access points will be affected. All based on real info IDA gathered through driving around Singapore and checking out whose wireless network has no security in place!

Check out the links below. Some of the participants in my row had their mouths half open when Leong showed the Minority Report Screen.. And the iBar! And the Wii!

Links
Twitter
Second Life
Home (PlayStation 3)
Tabula Rasa
Perceptive Pixel (Minority Report! Impressive..)
iBar (an interactive bar-counter!! See ouc on left; watch a video)
Wii
Robotcub

Sponsor Track 2B: Stubbs

Collaborative Learning, by Phil Stubbs

Collaboration between People, Communities, and Tools. Stubbs is giving really amazing examples of collaboration. Surprisingly, they don't look that difficult to do...

___Older students collaborate with younger students

• 8 year olds design a book for 4 year olds.
• They surveyed the 4 year olds on what books they like
• Authentic audience, authentic problem, authentic solution!
  
  Students collaborate with parents and grandparents
  
  
• Survey grandparents and parents on where they have been in the world (show world map)
• They collect pictures from grandparents, parents and their own photos so that they can see how the world has changed over time.
  
  Collaboration between students across schools
  
  
• Project on the holocaust project. Different schools on a single platform with separate forum groups. Wow.
• Teachers get a trail of everything a student posts. Possible to plot the student's learning journey.
  
  Outside experts
  
  
• Parents who are experts, for example a marine engineer.
  
• Real-life professionals such as architects and designers to be consultants to the students.
  
  Global collaborations
  
  
• Six year olds in Hong Kong collaborating with Inuit kids!
  
• Kids all over the world writing a nonsense poem together in a forum.

A flat world...

Links
British Council Climate Cool
Students from HK, UK, and elsewhere learn about climate change together. There is even a joint essay writing exercise that gets forwarded to the South China Morning Post.

Towards the Olympics
Students from HK, UK, and China talk about issues relating to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games through to London 2012.

UniServity

Sponsor Track 2B: Playware Studios

Learning the Fun Way, by Victor Goh, Playware Studios

Teenagers are different today. They are parallel processors who think nothing about chatting with seven people concurrently. They prefer graphics and animations over texts. They are active, not passive, and expect payoff for efforts. More interestingly, teenagers see play as work and work as play, and expect fantasy and reality in equal measure. Technology is viewed as life, not as a separate entity.

How do we reach out to teenagers? This is where games come in. Games appeal to teenagers because they are a form of fun, a form of play, have rules, and have goals. For games to be effective, they need to have a healthy balance of entertainment and content. If a game gets too heavy on content, it becomes overbearing and tedious.

What do you think about games in the classroom? Do you have any effective and fun games to share?

[By the way, the Immersive Augmented Environment is pretty exiciting. It is a multisensory experience called 4Di. Not 3D but 4D, ok! Don't play play...]

Links
Playware Studios

Researcher Track 2A: Zuiker

Gaming Boundaries Through and For Learning, by Dr Steven Zuiker

"The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education." (Economist)

Hmm... do you agree?

Zuiker brings up really interesting ideas about place and space. He talks about how we are moving from a place-based world to a space-based world where places and spaces are increasingly blended together. I am real; I am virtual; I am real again. Space is a Muslim woman visiting a synagogue in Second Life; it is a Dutch teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture in Habbo Hotel. Stealing virtual furniture! That would be inconceivable just three years ago.

Zuiker also warns about disembodied knowledge. He says that teacher cannot simply give content or rich experiences. Instead, teachers must embed content into context into rich experiences. And this is where virtual spaces come in. It helps provide context and experience. An example of such a virtual space is Quest Alantis.

Very interesting stuff.

Links
Kindle
Quest Alantis
Habbo Hotel