As the winter 2022-2023 term is coming to an end, it gives me an opportunity to think about how we have been using smartphones in my physics classrooms in the last few years. While the original goal was to engage students, especially when we had to teach fully online, as our experience grew, we were […]

This year, for the first time in my life I had an opportunity to visit a rodeo. Even though my Ph.D. is from the University of TX, I never had a chance to see a real rodeo there. I also have never visited the famous Calgary Stampede or similar events. To be honest, I didn’t […]

This year I was invited to be one of the judges of the International LUMA StarT competition. This is a large international competition organized by my colleagues at the University of Helsinki in Finland. StarT competition invites educators and students from all around the world to present and share exciting ideas about teaching and learning […]

Dear Science Educators: Today is an exciting day for many of us in British Columbia, as we are starting our new academic year.  It is especially exciting as many of us who had to teach online can return back to our campuses. While online education has its advantages, seeing students in person is also very […]

This summer I had an opportunity to teach an intensive online course in our M.Ed. in Science Education program. My course focused on using technology in STEM education. One of the assignments in the course was to design a professional development activity that would support teachers in incorporating technologies in their practice. This is what […]

For the last two+ years, my colleagues and I have been working hard to organize an international STEM in Education Conference. It is the second time we are organizing it and Prof. David Anderson and I are co-chairs this time around. When we started our preparation in 2018, we had no idea that the conference […]

It took my colleague Prof. Rina Zazkis and I more than two years to write this paper. I am so glad it is out now and I am very proud of the results of our collaboration: https://journals.helsinki.fi/lumat/article/view/1519 Here is the abstract: Abstract This study examines the knowledge for teaching of prospective secondary physics teachers as […]

As another year amidst this pandemic is coming to an end, it is an opportunity to reflect of what has happened and most importantly what we have learned from it. While not surprisingly we hear lots of voices on the negative effects of the pandemic on learning, I would like to ask myself the following […]

A number of years ago I read a book by one of my favourite authors – Mitch Albom, “The  Five  People You  Meet  in Heaven”.  One of the themes of this book is that some people we encounter in our lives make a profound impact on us independently if we realized that at the time […]

This Friday, I was invited to take part in the BC Science Teachers’ Association Annual Conference, called Catalyst. This is an annual gathering of science teachers from all across British Columbia. Usually, most of the teachers come from the Lower Mainland as the conference often happens here. However, this year it was an online conference […]