Getting ready for September!
Presenting my work on Deliberate Pedagogical Thinking with Technology in STEM at Beijing Normal University (May, 2017)
As I am getting ready for September and for a new academic year, I keep thinking about why I like my work and why it is not a job, but a career (if not passion). This is going to be my 25th year of teaching (officially!), which makes me wonder how fast the time flew.
So what attracts me the most – is an opportunity to think about exciting things, such as how we can use technology to promote mathematics and science education for our students and future teachers. For example, a few years ago I started using Collaborative Learning Annotation System (CLAS) and I think it helped me improve the quality of my teacher-candidates’ learning experiences significantly. For the last year we have been working hard on creating short videos of science experiments relevant to BC curriculum – Math & Science Education Videos for all. Once again, we have been using various technologies to do that – from YouTube to Camtasia, etc.
In the past my students and I have created a database of conceptual STEM questions for students, teachers and parents.
I also keep thinking about data collection technology that we all now have at our fingertips – our smartphones and of course computer simulations. So the possibilities are limitless. However, it also means we have to try and figure out how we use these amazing tools to promote learning. These tools will not do a revolution in education. They will open new possibilities, but we have to be prepared to use them to promote learning. So this brings me to my own research endeavours. This is the focus of my research – developing Deliberate Pedagogical Thinking with Technology in STEM – helping STEM teachers learn how to take advantage of these new possibilities. I am very excited to continue working on it as we need to change how future STEM teachers think of technology if we want them to incorporate it effectively in their teaching. This is definitely worth thinking about and this is why I am so excited to star the new academic year!