Annual Meeting at Escuela de Lenguas

Escuela de Lenguas, the language teaching institution that depends on Facultad de Humanidades of the University of La Plata, celebrated a new anniversary with a round of conferences on Saturday 22nd September. The talks were grouped into four different topics. I chose Educational Technology (of course!). Not only did I choose that set of conferences because it's my favourite topic, but because I knew Nelba Quintana would deliver one of the talks and I wanted to see her. Liliana Simón, a colleague that I met at Facultad de Informática when we were attending the seminars of our Master's, would also make a presentation. Good opportunity to know what other colleagues are dealing with.

The first three talks were by a group of French teachers: . They have fostered an agreement between the University of La Plata and l'Université de Poitiers to use an online course and LMS developed by the French university, DEFI, to teach advanced French to Argentine students. The French will provide the online platform, technical assistance and content. Argentine teachers will tutor the students. This is the first step towards more localized content in the future, once the contract is over. The curriculum has a strong oral component with written and recorded feeedback.


Then Liliana presented the concept of Web2.0 and some social webtools and the audience discussed the assumption that children are technology natives and we adults are technology immigrants. In her second talk she shared how she is using the online platform developed by Facultad de Informática of the University of La Plata, webUNLP, with her 1st year students of the English teacher training university school. Unlike the previous case, which consists of a purely online course, the content on webUNLP would be complementary to the regular f2f classes and would only comprise one of the units of the syllabus.

Lastly, Nelba presented the Writing Matrix project and showed some participant example blogs, and her experience encouraging blogging among the Escuela de Lenguas students. Nelba did an excellent job promoting blogging among the audience and her enthusiasm sounded real and catching.