I will never forget my arrival in Hong Kong, having come from a very collaborative educational community and arriving in a school in 2005 where I was the only teacher to know what a blog was. At my very first meeting about directions of IT in the school I asked about the IT specialist community in Hong Kong and was told “I think a bloke at Shatin College knows a bit”.

Later in that year I finally got to meet up with a few colleagues at a meeting arranged by Graeme Deuchars at German Swiss International who did a great job of getting us all into a room but it was only a small group of mostly large international schools. There was no culture of regular meeting up and sharing in the majority of Hong Kong English Medium schools.

It was a long way from this when a group of us gathered at Kellett School last night for a session of sharing around the free and open source software Scratch, which the logo team at MIT are now making available to the Educational Community. Clive Dawes was our very able and gracious host but teachers from various schools attended to share and to learn.

Tonight we have a meeting for planning the 21st Century Learning conference set to happen next October in Hong Kong. At the same time, there is a Dartfish seminar at German Swiss International which is taking teachers through the use of video analysis for analysing and correcting sporting technique. We have just had a series of workshops here in Hong Kong by Jamie McKenzie which were well attended by regional schools.  Jamie plans to return in March of next year for another set of workshops.

What all of this says to me is that there is a wind of change blowing through the Hong Kong educational community surrounding the effective use of ICT for learning. It is a welcome breeze and one that looks to bring about a powerful change to the landscape here.

I for one, am looking forward to being a part of it.

Photo: Wind Farm by Zonifer Lloyd