My first post was called ‘Testing the Waters’ and a lot has happened both personally and professionally since then.  Between getting married and some beach time on our honeymoon, I’ve arrived in Australia to carry out my latest endeavour: my Australia Endeavour Award at the University of Wollongong.

The goals of my award are to:

1) Engage in professional development with practising teachers.

2) Improve technology integration into pre-service education courses at my home institution.

3) To establish a network of researchers.

Since arriving at the end of June I’ve managed to make a start towards each of these goals. I attended and presented at the annual ASERA (Australasian Science Education Research Association) conference held at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Sippy Downs, Queensland. My presentation entitled ‘Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century: Realities and Possibilities of Social Media’ was well attended and I received some really good feedback. A pdf of my ASERA presentation and of my ASERA paper are both available here. At the conference I attended some really interesting talks by researchers who are studying a variety of social media applications in science education. I will blog about some of them here in the near future. I made contact with a few people whom I would really like to visit during my time here in Australia in Melbourne and in Brisbane.  So in this way I’ve been working on establishing a network of researchers in this area (Goal #3). A highlight of the conference for me however, was kangaroo sightings on campus:

Kangaroos on University of Sunshine Coast campus.

On Monday, I met with Wendy Nielsen, my colleague here in Wollongong, and we developed some plans for my time here. One of them, emerging from some of my results about how students use Facebook to support their science learning, is to set up a Facebook page for her next primary science methods course that is starting up in a couple of weeks. This is one way in which I hope to achieve my second goal: to improve technology integration in pre-service teacher education. While I am here I will also learn a lot about Slowmation, a science pedagogy championed here in Wollongong, which I will integrate into our courses at VIU when I get back.

Finally,  I hope to meet with practising Australian teachers to see what kinds of interesting things science teachers are doing with social media. I spent this morning examining the conference program for CONASTA (Conference of Australian Science Teachers Association) being held in Canberra next week. The conference is very expensive, but there are definitely some presenters that I would like to meet including Adrian Camm (@adriancamm) and Britt Gow (@brittgow) who both maintain interesting and popular blogs. I’ve connected with them on Twitter, but there’s nothing like attending a workshop and meeting people face to face, so I’ll be looking into arranging to attend at least one day of CONASTA next week.

My blog postings will become much more frequent over the next couple of months as I document all the new things I will be learning about here in Australia!