St Joseph’s Institution, Singapore.

Yesterday. My first full day in Singapore on this trip. Did not sleep much the first night. Too much on my mind. Getting past the first workshop or presentation is always a bit of a hurdle. Not sure why. Anxiety, probably. Those stage-fright tensions. Always feel it even though I have been doing this sort of thing since 1994. Once the curtain is raised I feel fine.

I conducted the first workshop at St Joseph’s Institution Junior School [wikipedia entry]. The campus is located on the site of the former St Michael’s School in Novena. It is a primary school. The workshop consisted of presentation and a hands-on component. There were teachers from a variety of schools across Singapore. About 30 teachers in all.

St Joseph’s Institution Junior School. Condominiums in the background.

Time was at a premium and I attempted to make the most of it. I created a presentation ppt yet that is more for the benefit of the participants as they make notes on the hard copy as I usually flick across to a browser and show them examples of the tools at work.

The teachers were quite reserved which is not unusual and I always look for ways to break the ice like singing a song in mandarin, sharing some anecdotes about history and so on.

Once the questions begin and then things begin to bubble along and the workshop thrives. I am always grateful for that first question. I think all of the other participants are too. We looked at eduBlogs, Twitter, QR Codes, QR Codes generators, Flickr, Compfight, Posterous and Plurk among others. I shared some of the wikis made by my Year Eleven students and blogs written by my Year Nine students. The participants also received Twitter greetings from acroamatic, janelowe, isaakkwok, skytrystsjoy, syamsul and catspyjamasnz. More materials and downloads can be found here.

Ming Liang, Keith, Chan Chuan and Feliz (l to r)

The workshop was organised by Keith See from the Infocom Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). His colleagues, Chan Chuan and Feliz were also in attendance. The IDA is working in tandem with the Ministry of Education on a number of innovative projects including the Edvantage Programme, Future Schools@Singapore and iAccess~Interactive Learning Trails. There are many more projects. Singapore is an island state. Its main resource are the children of Singapore. As well as my presentation there was a demonstration by Ng Ming Liang of G Element Pte Ltd of Earth@SG and several impressive geographic visualisation tools being developed for use in teaching and learning.

The day concluded about 5.30PM or thereabouts and I congratulated the teachers for their attentiveness on a late Friday afternoon. The likelihood of that happening with teachers in Australia is not as high. Once that Australian school bell rings at 3.30PM there is a stampede, with the teachers leading the charge, and the school is empty by 3.35PM, with the dust barely settled.

Chinatown

I chatted with some of the teachers after that and we then began to make tracks for our respective digs. Jumped on the MRT and alighted at Outram Park. I eventually ended up in Chinatown and had dinner at my favourite haunt. I have been eating in this ‘coffee shop’ for about nine years now. I used to work just around the corner. Ate the usual and slowly consumed a nice drop of Tiger beer with the owner of the coffee shop.

Tiger Beer

Then, unwinding. I sat for a while, thought about the day, watched the world go by, finished the beer, cooled down and then caught a train and bus back to the NTU campus.