Paul Woods - One Laptop Per Child

The most important lesson from the places where OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) has been implemented is that you cannot ignore training and teacher development. Paul Woods of the British Council spoke about it being vital if the project is to be successful, although there are experiments by people such as Sugata Mitre (Hole in the wall project) that claim to have success by just giving kids access to the technology.

It's also what you do with the device that makes all the difference. Nicholas Negroponte has also said that OLPC is all about empowering children through education. There are 1/2 million XO laptops in Uruguay and many other laptops all over the world including in Nepal, Afghanistan, India, Rwanda, Madagascar and Argentina, Venezuela and Peru.

Research has been done during these projects, with results reporting greater learner satisfaction, and highly engaged learning taking place. Criticisms in Argentina have been: lack of connectivity and problems over maintenance when Ines go wrong.

Paul Woods then talked about the Plan Ceibal project in Uruguay, where he is involved as Programme manager of the English teaching, and he showed  a video about the project,which is proving to be very successful.

A humorous moment occurred when an interview with Paul appeared in the video and he seemed to be wearing the same shirt!

In Uruguay, Paul has found that the British Council have been writing materials to use on the laptops and for the remote teaching. Every 9 weeks the students are doing tests, and the results of these have been very positive.

The project the British Council is expanding quickly and results of the pilot have shown that many of the kids have taught their parents how to use the laptops.

Paul finished by showing a fabulously cute video taken by a teacher, of two kids demonstrating the English that they had learnt.

Questions from the audience included questions about software (Linux), and whether money would have been better spent on teacher training in the country - there was a concern, and the British Council have told the Uruguayan government that they should be doing this too.

One to one learning with handheld devices - Michael Carrier

In this session, Michael Carrier spoke about the benefits of adopting a Programme of 1:1 handheld devices in the classroom, starting by talking about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) programme.

Michael quoted Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC: "What children lack is not capability, it is opportunity and resources"

Michael spoke about the places where these 1:1 learning is being put into place, and where it is showing success. He also spoke about places where the programmes have not been so successful. The reason why many of these projects fail is well known, according to Michael. It is usually due to not investing in teacher training and teacher development, which means the teachers do not feel involved or comfortable using the devices in the classroom.

In many places where 1:1 programmes have been successfully implemented have seen some very positive responses from children, teachers and parents. Uruguay and the Plan Ceibal is the world leader at the moment, and Michael spoke about the work the British Council is doing in Uruguay using teleconferencing to help the children learn English  because the country does not have enough trained English teachers in primary schools.

In order to make is work, Michael believes that new teacher competencies need to be developed, including e-moderation courses and he said policy development is also very important. The budget and setting aside money to invest in teacher development is so important in determining the success of these projects, and Michael called for more teacher training courses to be developed to help teachers develop the skills they need to be able to teach in these new contexts.

To finish, Michael looked at what's happening next, including new models of publishing.

Questions and comments from the audience included a man who asked how you can use this type of learning in a very large class, and how it can be evaluated. Michael responded that more research needs to be done and teachers need to try out different models to allow for this, conducting action research. One way of dealing with large classes, for example, is to get the children working in groups.

Another important feature of many of these programmes involve using a Learning Management System to support the learning taking place. Michael also believes that there will be new careers opening up for teachers with so much online learning and teaching taking place.

Michael's presentation can be downloaded from http://www.michaelcarrier.com

Plan Ceibal - Dario Luis Banegas

Dario Luis Banegas spoke in this session 'Learning English through remote learning' about e British Council's role in Plan Ceibal, which has rolled out XO laptops to all Primary aged children throughout Uruguay.

Dario spoke about his role as project manager and how one of the key aspects for him is the relationships between the different roles (lesson plan writers, materials designers, classroom teachers, remote teachers, e-moderators, children, parents and educational administrators).

In the project, classroom teachers in Uruguay are supported by remote teachers, mainly in Argentina in order to teach children English. Video conferencing is used to transmit the image and sound of the remote teachers into the Uruguayan classrooms and the classroom teacher facilitates. The lack of English of most of the classroom teachers is the reason why this is done, but the classroom teachers are undergoing an English Programme in tandem, supported by e-moderators, who also talk to them via Skype and help with the planning of lessons.

Dario showed videos of actual classes in progress and spoke about the challenges and successes of this interesting project, which is increasing in intensity this year from 250 lessons a week to thousands across the country.

This world in which we live in

David Crystal's very entertaining opening plenary at the IATEFL conference in Liverpool started with a line from Paul McCartney's song 'Live and let die' (the blog post title) that contains a double preposition.

He then looked at other examples of this in newspaper reports and popular media. David Crystal also looked at other examples of non-standard grammar, including double negatives in Beatles songs.


David then told the audience that 'blends' such as 'within how long did it take...' , a combination of 'within what time period' and 'how long did it take' also occur in lectures and he then proceeded to use examples from his own recorded lectures that showed everyone ends up doing this in speech.

Examples of blends rarely appear in public writing, usually, because it is the job of the editor or copy-editor to rephrase any blends that are found. However, some blends do slip through the net. On the Web, in particular, there are examples to be found in social media, Wikipedia, blogs, etc. Taking examples from the top UK blogs, David Crystal showed examples of blends.

The next point David Crystal made was that grammar helps people remember things, and he showed us with examples of strings of numbers of one then two syllables. He also showed examples from ELT, including writing from a 15-year-old.

Over the next week, there will be opportunities to watch (live and recorded) a number of other presentations from the conference as well as interviews of those taking part.

Addition:

The recording of David Crystal's plenary and the follow up questions can be found below and on the IATEFL Liverpool Online site, http://www.iatefl.org/liverpool-2013/liverpool-2013.

Joe Dale - IATEFL LTSIG PCE

Joe Dale started his rapid-fire presentation off with information about information about the changing world of technology, with the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of the Martini generation (i.e. learning any time, any place, anywhere) meaning educators need to pay more attention to possible uses of mobile devices in the classroom.

Joe shared a list of different ipad apps he recommends for language teaching and learning, and also recommended a book by Chris Smith (http://aneducatorsipad.com/) for any educators looking to use iPads in the classroom.

QR codes and how they can be used in the classroom was mentioned. In particular, the use that Kelda Richards (
http://keldarichards.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/le-mur-parlant/) makes of QR codes for her 'Making your walls talk' stood out as an innovative way of making use of them in the classroom.

Joe mentioned a number of different sources of evidence of the value of using iPads in the classroom.

Models Joe mentioned were:
- http://www.tpack.org/
- http://msad75summertechnologyinstitute.wordpress.com/beyond-substitution/
- http://teachwithyouripad.wikispaces.com/Blooms+Taxonomy+with+Apps

This was the last presentation of the day, to be followed by a panel discussion by all speakers and our special guest from TESOL, Deborah Healey. The recording of this, which is to be live streamed, along with the other presentations of the day, can be found along with links to all. Of the presentation slides on the LT SIG website: http://ltsig.org.uk

Kristina Smith IATEFL LTSIG Liverpool PCE

Kristina Smith is our first presenter of the afternoon and her focus is 'Autonomy in Online and Blended Learning'

one of the first suggestions from Kristina was that the teacher should start by considering the culture of the learners, considering the interaction between content delivery and deeper learning, individual and social (i.e. group work), teacher led and self directed learning online.

One of the issues that Kristina cam across with one group of teachers that she worked with was that they were not allowed to ask the children they taught personal questions, because it was an invasion of privacy and it might embarrass some of them.

Kristina started asking the audience to consider where they stand on a line between humanistic and behaviourist teaching, then looking at Tassinari's dynamic model of Learner Autonomy (see http://sisaljournal.org/archives/march12/tassinari/)

When it comes to the environment a teacher teaching online should consider the learners, the other stakeholders (the school, the management, etc).

Digital literacy is another issue with some of the teachers Kristina works with, and some teachers do not know how to copy and paste a URL or how to take a screenshot. The key to dealing with this is patience and not making assumptions, helping the teacher in different ways (how to videos and PDF instructions). Kristina uses http://www.screenr.com/ to make instructional videos for the teachers.

Join the IATEFL ltsig live online from Liverpool for the last of our speakers at the PCE - see http://ltsig.org.uk

Paul Braddock - The Flipped Classroom (IATEFL LTSIG)

The photo shows, live from Liverpool, Paul Braddock talking about the Flipped Classroom and leading a discussion about what it is and the pros and cons of reversing the role of what you ask learners to do in class and what you ask them to do at home (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_teaching).

One early definition of the flipped classroom was the idea to invert traditional teaching methods, delivering instruction online outside of the class and moving "homework" into the classroom.

Paul said that this definition of the flipped classroom adheres to a behaviorist view of teaching and learning and perhaps it is more suited to a subject with content rather than teaching a language.

One point made by an audience member was that, as a student of literature, she was asked to do a lot of reading at home, and what she ended up developing was the skill of being able to talk about books without having read them. She said that the danger with our students is that they end up doing something similar and then not getting the input.

A more updated definition has the flipped classroom 'providing initial input outside of the class' and 'promoting more output in the classroom', which Paul says is more relevant to language teaching and learning.

Join the IATEFL ltsig live from Liverpool today by connecting to our livestream (see http://ltsig.org.uk for details of the programme and how to join)