An Expat Educator in Asia

Readers of this blog will know that the last few years of my life have been an immensely rewarding but often frustrating time for me as I have gone about trying to work with schools to support 21st Century Learning in a region where many schools are still so predominantly textbook and examination driven. Whilst [...]

I know that I am not the only teacher in this town who is genuinely excited about the opportunity presented by the Apple Education Leadership Summit in Hong Kong this weekend. Indeed, if my Twitter network is anything to go by, it seems to have the attention of most of the technology using educators in [...]

I just sent the following letter out to the members of the sub-committee charged with the challenging but enormously motivating role of trying to realise a dream of having a worthwhile and successful “Student Strand” to the conference this October.

Once again I acknowledge how busy you all are and trust that you are finding [...]

It often works that the things that you least expect to be of great value turn out to be really significant. I admit to not having Julie Lindsay and Vicky Davis’s Flat Classroom Conference high on my priority list. Not sure why this is but I think it might have something to do with the [...]

The collective group of interested educators planning the 21st Century Learning @ HK conference next October need to decide on a theme that captures all that we wish to convey as soon as they can. It is a truism about conferences like this that once the idea is “born”, as it were, we all suddenly [...]

Have you ever been to a workshop/conference/seminar and met colleagues who are disappointed in the quality of the speakers in spite of the speaker being “on the money” WRT the stated outcomes of the conference? I guess that some folks can seem impossible to please. Having said that, as an experienced conference organizer, I am [...]

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 [...]

I had a day of speaking to a number of really positive people yesterday about the possibility of running a very large international conference focussing on 21st Century Learning here in Hong Kong next October. I am feeling very positive about this now. I am certain that we can get vendors, teachers and kids on [...]

Since attending the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai last month, I have been asked to consider the possibility of hosting next year’s conference in Hong Kong. Whilst on the one hand, I am very keen to get something like this going in Hong Kong, on the other I know just how difficult it is to [...]

I don’t even know how I came across an invitation to Barcamp 2008 at Oxford House in Quarry Bay on the weekend but I guess it is a measure of grassroots social networking that I did and I enjoyed it a lot.
It was a great opportunity to come and share ideas in an open environment [...]