Phil Towndrow of the National Institute of Education in Singapore conducted the main STETS workshop for 2004, on Friday 26 November and the morning of Saturday 27.
New media and the escalating needs of today's learners are constantly restructuring educational landscapes. Thus, knowing why information and communication technology (ICT) is useful has become a key element of knowing how to use it effectively. But how can teachers balance institutional goals and constraints in order to use ICT in an informed way?
The workshop explored this conundrum by identifying, describing and analysing issues relating to the roles and qualities of teachers, students and ICT in contemporary language and communication teaching contexts. The objective was to derive a set of jointly constructed context-sensitive pedagogical principles that could be used to guide L & C teachers in the formulation of action plans relating to their work.
Drawing on their ICT-based experiences, participants worked collaboratively in a state-of-the-art multimedia learning environment to generate and respond to a series of case studies that required innovative solutions. All the workshop participants took away with them a CD-RW of the resources they produced in their sessions.
