As we are beginning this new academic year, I am thinking of the former Teacher-Candidates and now newly minted science and mathematics teachers who will be entering their classrooms as part-time or full-time teachers for the first year this fall. While I have been teaching for a while now (20+ years), I still remember the […]

Once again I have been teaching a graduate summer course for the UBC Master of Education Technology Program. While teaching an online course all summer long is a challenge, teaching this course is always very inspirational. ETEC533 is titled: Technology in mathematics and science classroom. I always learn a lot from this course as the […]

This year I attended a Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) Congress in Edmonton. The meeting made me think once again about the importance of science communication. For example, I attended a number of plenaries and invited talks and some of them were very exciting. For example, Sara Seager from MIT gave a great talk about […]

This is a very special certificate for me. I am so glad I decided to take on this challenge. I have learned so much from these teachers and I am looking forward to more interactions with our Chinese colleagues.

  I started teaching the second week of my course today. I have enjoyed the day very much as I had a very good interpretor, and I knew much better how to engage students. Today we discussed how to use clickers in the classroom and solved some interesting problems. It is amazing that Chinese teachers […]

As I have just started teaching and online summer course ETEC 533, I decided to re-read the book that has been serving as a key reading (one might say the backbone) to the entire course: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. I love it as it is directed to educators who want to […]

While we like to discuss how technology negatively affects our ability to connect with people, I would like to discuss how technology allows us to ask and answer new questions. For example, as we have gotten the results of the new International mathematics and science assessment, we might want to decide to compare different countries. […]

Yesterday I had an opportunity to watch a movie “The Imitation Game”. On first glance, the movie is about Alan Turing and how he and a team of brilliant young people were able to crack the Enigma code during WWII. However, it is only an overall impression. While it is obviously a Hollywood movie and […]

I would like to share this video. I think it is a very inspirational video, but I also think it is a troubling one. It shows that our society (luckily we are much better in Canada than in the US) does not value teaching enough, as we are not ready not only to pay teachers […]

December is often the time when we think of our New Year resolutions. For some of us they stick, while for others, they fade away during the first few weeks of January. In this post, I would like to write about the New Year resolution I made in 2010 – to improve my public speaking […]