Asian and European educators meet in Dundalk, Ireland

Back from the 10th AEC-NET (Asia-Europe Classroom Net) conference, my mind is buzzing with ideas. After many years of coordinating AEC-NET projects, and preparing project presentations for the conference, this time round I took the backseat, to be able to observe and reflect. The Singapore admin team, together with the Irish conference hosts, had put together a hectic 5 days of lectures, workshops, presentations, and project group meetings, under the title 'Apps in Asian and European Classrooms! Unleashing Educational Creativity'.

Schools in most participating countries have definitely moved on. There is serious talk about taking action, and not just marvelling at philosophical ideas somewhere in a distant 'cloud', as used to be the case a few years ago. Many schools are technologically quite well equipped - some have even moved into the 1:1 laptop or iPad era, like my own. The hardware is there but now the question is how best to utilize it to enhance learning, and engage our 21st-century students.

The conference scene has changed a lot, too - screens of different sizes abound amongst the audience

One afternoon we had a dynamic 5-workshop 'speed data' session, with app after app presented at a breath-taking tempo. Tagxedo word clouds, Animoto videos, Geogebra, Audacity, Google apps, Vimeo, Kinect Scratch, blogging services, Etherpad... An endless list of applications and gimmickry was blast onto us, like a firework show. I wonder what the more techonogically novice teachers thought, as even I, with at least some previous exposure and knowledge, found it challenging to follow! I started to think that while it is certainly useful for a teacher to have a digital "toolbox" of various apps, for example, to visualize complicated concepts, in the end, using hundreds and hundreds of these apps all the time is not the key issue. True, this session kept us teachers awake and running, in the after-lunch sleepy hours, and would probably work to do the same for students, but something more solid is needed to shift educational practices.

One of the most interesting presenters for me, was Ms Chan Lai Peng, Deputy Director from the MOE in Singapore. Having organised some student exchanges, and virtual projects with schools in Singapore, I have realized how much our two small nations have in common, despite the striking geographical and cultural differences. Both nations, with small populations, have competed for the top positions in the OECD PISA assessments, for example. Ms Chan explained to us how they have come to the 3rd Master Plan concerning ICT in education. Vigorous programmes have been put into place to deepen the pedagogy of ICT use, and for each school to reach a base line standard in ICT integration. A lot of attention is paid to cyber wellness programmes, with student ambassadors to tutor their peers in every school. What's more, every school has a full-time technical assistant on site - something that we Finnish teachers can only dream of! Ms Chan finished her lively talk in this observation: "Technology is but a tool but it can be a powerful one when put in the hands of skillful teachers." It is our challenge now, as teachers, to keep updating and developing our skills to keep up with the fast pace of change.

8th AEC-NET conference in Sonderborg, Denmark

Greetings from Denmark! I have more or less been 'off the radar' for over two weeks. At first there was the presentation to prepare as we were lucky to be shortlisted for the AEC-NET award again. I wanted to introduce the audience to something new, and practised with Prezi, the new presentation tool developed in Hungary. I had some trouble downloading the finished presentation and was rather panicky at one point, since the presentation date was getting closer and closer, but with the friendly and speedy help from the Prezi team, plus totally unexpected assistance through Twitter, I managed in the end. Pheww! Thank you so much everybody!

On the whole, though, It was a lot of fun learning a totally different concept of putting a presentation together. PowerPoint is so linear and predictable, whereas Prezi forces you to start from the big picture and then add surprising details and fun parts to it. I must say Prezi did live up to its novelty value, especially since all the other presenters relied on good old PowerPoint. I got a lot of interested questions. Here is the beginning 'canvas' of the presentation, where I used pictures of lego characters as part of the illustration, since we were in Denmark.

I don't think it was only thanks to Prezi, though, that we were lucky to win another AEC-NET award for our WHAZZUP? project. We did have a very lively online community last year, where students learned a lot

about the 10 different participating schools and their respective cultures. Students were also guided to more academic blog writing in addition to the popular forum discussion and chat, where more colloquial language could be used. Many of them also produced multimedia presentations on various topics that they were learning at school. Creating a positive digital footprint, and responsible net behaviour were also among our goals, and to a large extent we did manage to get the message across.

Here we are, the winning WHAZZUP? team - I and my colleague Merja plus our student Henna, who presented with us, holding the certificate, and two of our partner teachers, Geeta Rajan, from New Delhi India, and on the right Adrienne Webb from Dublin Ireland. Adrienne, our partner for many years in various projects, has just published a very nice account of her AEC experience on the webpage of the Computer Education Society of Ireland.

As good, efficient and easy as virtual communication and collaboration is these days, I still think face-to-face meetings retain an important place in building trust and motivation for lasting partnerships. All my long-term colleagues around the world are ones that I have had the chance to meet and get to know personally outside the virtual world. I feel energized and inspired after sharing ideas with so many wonderful teachers from so many countries. The new WHAZZUP? 2009-2010 is on its way - a hopefully improved version from last year. Working on intercultural projects is an ongoing learning process that I really enjoy!