Educamp Singapore 4 @ ITE College East

So here’s yet another attempt of me sharing what events are on lately. Happened recently is Educamp, where people get-together to talk about various aspects of educations and learning. People get to share their cool projects, ideas and research findings. The topics are then based on participants votes.

The 4th installment of EduCamp is held at ITE College East (LT3), where there are about 40 odd people. They come from various education institutions & diverse backgrounds. Well, some educators, some doing some awesome startups and curators.

One of the hot topics that was on the board was the debate of virtual online classrooms, the likes of Khan Academy and OpenLectures. What is the future of online learning? — The face to face element is still really important, so there needs to be some kind of balance.

The next is about Flipped Learning, where the teachers move lectures out of the classroom and moves the ‘”homework” to the classroom. Students get to spend more time about problems in class with their peers and get their lectures at home (Through teacher-aided online materials, online videos and so on). Mind-opening, great potential.

There was some chatter about Flipped Presentations, where students come to school prepared for every lesson at home to talk about what they’ve learnt & they shared it with everyone else. Pretty insightful.

Some insights of the usage of education through online media; if you change the medium but not the teaching method, it won’t work. No matter its podcasting, to vodcasting or what Social Media platforms.

(Next the event got split into both rooms, for those who can fill me in for the other room, drop me a tweet (@thejeremygoh) or email me (contact on the right), you’ll really help everyone in the community, loads of karma points!)

The next presentation is a brief showcase of an iPhone app to help educators, it got developed in a few hours during a development bootcamp. It mainly is a to-do list integrated with a class register, so that would really help collecting Edusave forms easier/report book/class tests/etc. It also aims to include a private social network in it, where teachers could basically gossip about students (in a good way) & help students to improve through collaboration. Monetization through subscription & customized development. Base code will be open sourced. (Still in discussion) Thoughts?

The next presentation is where an NUS lecturer share that he took the learning out of the classroom, bringing students to the nature like Palau Ubin or Botanical Gardens, where they use their laptops to look through pinpoints done by lecturers, students would have to observe the plant, take photos of them & they would have to basically work together. A junior is attached to the senior (Junior gets to learn technical skills from Senior, Senior gets to learn project management skills) & during the process, the assignment must create some sort of fear (A police and thief concept), so that the student will be on their toes. Everyone had fun.

Startup Weekend, all about the history and the future in Startups!

The next presentation is about #edsg (Educate Singapore), where a group of people requests everyone to use that hashtag on any tweet on Twitter that has a form of educational value. A platform of people where they collaborate and learn different things from people. So if you’re on Twitter, use it, why not?

(I will fork the section out below and create a blog post dedicated about my talk soon)

Plug: I also spoke about Social Media in Education, here’s a sweet summary of points:

• Use Facebook Groups for Communications
• All your students are on it, you should too!
• That platform could allow a collaborative discussion in seconds, its human instinct to hit the comment and like button
• You get a ton of likes!
• Use Tumblr as a Blogging Platform
• Not that everyone in the world is using it, but it’s easy to use and manage
• The design and setting it up makes sure your content comes from, among anything else.
• Maths, Science, Geography? Condense all of those long texts and put it on Tumblr
• Use Wikia for Community Building — This case, Wikipedia for Classrooms
• Recognize: Not every student have identical learning abilities
• Students to make notes for every lesson and make sure they use Wikia to contribute it online — Threaten if they don’t when possible.
• Any student could edit those notes and add in theirs, making it more useful over time.
• Outcome: Solving class learning inequalities + Students sharing knowledge
• BONUS: Education is now open source, everyone could view and learn from there. Going out of schools, to help others in the world.
• Integration
• Your role is to find a way to integrate all of this tactics to help your learning.
• Good luck & remember to report back here!
• Questions?
• How About Twitter
• Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that limits the message to 140 characters, but the platform have a higher learning curve (learning about RT, @mentions and so on) and it is to saturated with many teenagers twitters posting about them wanting to cut themselves, relationship turmoil & I love you texts. So it’s basically too ‘noisy’.
• Okay: Here’s a great tip, you can hashtag your Twitter classroom topics, like get your students to hashtag your lectures and make sure that you can follow their conversation & vice versa via Twitter.
• You can contribute your questions by commenting below, I will write what I think here. On top of that, I will publish a blog post about Social Media in a conducive classroom / learning environment soon.

Visited HackerSpace after that, nothing too exciting about programming, development and coding. Well, if you’re interested, there’s W3Schools, get started there.

If you visited the event & have loads of additional materials and content to provide to my blog, please kindly share them, for the love of the community. Drop a tweet or email me (details on the sidebar)

Cheers!