We continue our recap of this year’s Better Learning conference with Caroline Thiriau sharing her highlights from the second day of the conference.
I really enjoyed being at the Better Learning conference this year. I was thrilled to be able to catch up with ‘old friends’ – teaching professionals who have been helping my team develop materials by reviewing drafts and providing feedback over the last few years. It was a great opportunity to meet those people again and, in some cases, put a face to a name. It was also great to meet new faces and create links with more people around the world with a common passion for learning and teaching.
Technology and its opportunities
Technology was, as ever, a hot topic -trying to predict its impact on the classrooms of the not-too-distant future. The title of Geoff Stead’s talk – Exciting, Messy, Empowering, Chaotic: Our digital future – pretty much sums it up for most of us, I think – exciting? yes; messy? absolutely; empowering? well, sometimes; chaotic? definitely! Possibly only infuriating missing in that list 😉
I found Paul Driver’s presentation on virtual reality (VR) really exciting in terms of the opportunities it presents. It‘s technology that seems so futuristic and yet, Paul showed us it is actually quite attainable. He showed as a fantastic use of it in teacher training he’d employed, where the teacher revisits one of their classes using VR to see how engaged the students were, what worked well and not so well, and so on. For learners, he showed how a 360 degree video with hotspots can provide vocabulary training but also critical thinking skills practice by creating problem-solving, detective-style tasks.
Student Engagement
Another theme which permeated the conference was student engagement, mentioned often in relation to the benefits of using technology in learning but I was especially fascinated in Zoltan Dornyei’s ideas on student engagement. The ideas he presented really helped me to interpret some of the findings from the market research we have recently carried out with adult learners which found that a lack of confidence in speaking is a huge barrier to actually practising speaking. Providing a ‘safe’ speaking environment in which students are able to make mistakes without fear of judgment, and creating group cohesiveness through cooperative learning tasks which engage the students and are proven to enhance learning, are key to getting over this confidence barrier.
There was a wealth of great topics and speakers throughout the conference. Unfortunately I can’t do justice to all of them here but I feel that I came away from the conference with renewed energy and enthusiasm so thank you to all who took part.
We will be publishing the third and final conference article tomorrow, but in the meantime, make sure to catch up with Jo Timerick’s take on the opening day of the conference.