Teachers Get Tech Tips from Students

Digital Generation Parents Share Their Wisdom

What is 21st century education?

Global Collaboration with Twitter

What does it take for a person in USA to know about my intentions?....well just my tweets.........

My tweets got published in the story by Vicki Davis
"Conversations about Global Collaboration"
Are you ready to be a part of a story or build one of your own?

Singapore's 21st Century Teaching Strategies

When will India be ready to accept this?

Today Edutopia in partnership with Pearson released the Education Everywhere video series focusing Singapore, this time. These details were stated:

Singapore Fast Facts

• When Singapore gained its independence in 1965, most of its population of two million people were unskilled and illiterate.
• The government invested in education, and by the early 1970s, all children had access to lower secondary education.
• In 2009, the first year Singapore participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, they placed near the top for all tested subjects: fifth for reading, second for mathematics, and fourth for science. See all 2009 PISA scores.
• Teaching is a highly-respected and well-compensated profession in Singapore. All teachers are trained at the country's National Institute of Education (NIE).
• All new teachers are paired with experienced teachers for mentoring, and peer feedback is built into the schedule.
• Teachers are entitled to 100 low or no-cost hours of professional development each year.
• There are approximately 522,000 students attending about 350 schools in Singapore's education system.
• Class sizes are large, especially at the secondary level, averaging 36 students per class.

 It also had the following video showing how tools such as twitter and facebook are  used on a regular basis in the classrooms of Ngee Ann Secondary School, one of the country's seven 'Future Schools'.

The video shows how 40 students in a class can ask different questions using twitter , all at the same time to the teacher. They can even vote for the right answer using a mobile phone.

Do such statistics not affect any educator who sees this video? Will India be ever a part of this series?

Flat Classroom Conference , Mumbai 2012

An amazing experience...........


Day 1 at Flat Classroom Conference ....


The day started with 400 people from all over the world in one auditorium at ASB Mumbai.....I felt like sitting with the whole world. So many people from different parts, irrespective of cultural differences, where all under one roof with a common purpose...."To be the best 21st Century educators,leaders and of course students....". Students and teachers united on a common platform to LEARN.

Next ....at Trident Hotel .....a member of team 9...meeting people from all parts of world for the first time and working together on an Action Project, just wonderful. Seeing students work in groups was even more amazing where they proved that there exists an "Educational Culture" which probably unites them. The strive to understand each other and support the theme "Opening up Education" to the fullest.

Working for 4 hours on a collaborative project we come out with our oral pitch and WOW we then present it to 10 teams of educators from all parts of the world. 2 minutes for each presentation......it was just fire...have a look at the video here....

21st Century Education.....My new form of teaching

Do I have to be on twitter to be a 21st Century Educator? 

Well it is your choice. The kind of learning I have had due to networking on twitter would not have been  possible in any other form. Even if it happened it would have taken ages. But the method of twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN) does come with a big Registration Cost....Your Comittment and Passion to learn.
Now siting in a remote city in India Twitter seems to act as my virtual staff room. "I have to learn so much..........". That is the feeling that I get every day. So many hastags and so many conversations going on with too many resources to catch up. Recently I had been to an Apple Education Leadership Tour.
A two hours hands on work on an Apple Ipad 2 completely changed the way I looked at my learning process and the same that is happening with my students who have such devices in their hands in my class. I made interactive books, edited videos , made my own videos, podcasts and what not. There, I listened to some amazing Apple Distinguished Educators and what goes in their classrooms in their schools. After listening to them when I came back I felt all my Unit Planners should be discarded and I needed to think on all of them again.

The effect of such exposure was evident in my next IB DP Physics class itself which was structured in such a way that it would force my students to think, do and learn on their own with my role being as just showing them the way to the think in the right direction. (maybe as I am still experimenting with my new method of teaching).

I simply designed my lesson plan by making a glog , a Scoop and using an ebook.
The glog was something like this.....(full glog at 


The next day the class had my scoop ....


From resources from Scoop which did not bore them as Powerpoints, I guess...they made their own CCD, in the virtual lab,learnt transfer of charge from a transfer of water in bucket simulation (in scoop). And the results were amazing. I could see and feel the students going through a journey while they were learning Charge Coupled Devices from Digital Technology and that too all on their own. I had to do very little explanation for that. I got energized further by an email from a  student stating"I think you should get more of such glogs...they actually made me question myself over wat we learnt n not jst accept the class blindly!  ". ..Devansh.
So now I feel I have a lot to do to implement all the same content of physics in such a manner where students need to do all the learning and thinking.

All these thoughts of mine got reinforced by a sudden entry in one of the hashtags #21clhk, today in my virtual staff room , twitter.There I stood virtually with all the participants of the 21st Century Learning Conference, sharing all their learning from the keynote speakers of the conference and the amazing resources . Amidst those resources came to know about Education Scientist Sugata Mitra (about whom I had already heard in my Apple Workshop), in details and the influence he had on so many educators.Have a look at this  video......So A New Journey Has Begun Today........Self Organized Education...........