Gary Motteram, University of Manchester

Welcome address

(Transcript continued ...) Gary Motteram: So I am going to be kind of, try to orchestrate it, conduct the process and try to keep the time it as best as I can, that might prove a little difficult with people at a distance as well as people locally. We are actually trying to record this as well, so what we are trying to do at the end is that we can put this actually up online so that people can see it. So that's then a little bit of the background so you will see we are inside this particular environment.

This is just an example of this kind of environment. When we first started it was called Breeze and its now called Adobe Connect and its a piece of software that allows people to connect from a number of places connect remotely together from a desktop rather the kind of typical video conferencing facilities that people would be familiar with where you have a room in one place and a room in another place.

So this allows people to sit at an individual in any cases in this project if you were at home does mostly to require people to have a broadband connection although you can get away with lower bandwidth .... As you see here from this particular slide you can have quite a number of people in the environment at the same time, although there are limitations to what you can do, as in every classroom. The more people that you have there it gets more complicated to do group work and interactive work it is perfectly possible to have a go at that and ...

What I am going to do is briefly just to show you a quick sample of a piece of material, I hope to find this now, because it crashed earlier, if you bear with me now as I try and talk, doing this at the same time. I am just going to show you a very short extract of the typical kind of teaching material that you find when you do this. So this you are seeing here the kind of, so this is the inside of Breeze itself of the meetings that are set up mainly as part of the project to be honest but you can also record the events as they go on and this for example, you'll see this person a bit lateron in this presentation. Daniela is going to talk about her experience. She was one of the trainees of this course and this is her conducting ... so this is her working with a friend of hers post the course, actually teaching us some Rumanian. So we are going to hear a bit of Rumanian, to give you an insight.

So you can see all the different tools that are being used within the environment, that are available, so you have already seen so there is a typical chatboard, there are the attendees list, it has a number of facilities, an interactive whiteboard, so I just let this run a little bit so that you can see how a teachers may work this environment and then we will go back and we'll hear Christian who will talk a little bit about the background a bit .... (3 min intermission) .... so Daniela will talk about the lesson a bit lateron and let's see what she says about some of the reasons of her picking that, but clearly she is teaching about chocolate, which post lunch is probably not such a good idea to show. If I can find time lateron which I probably wont, I can show you one or two examples but because of time we ought to move on and I'll go back to the environment there.

So to say then, this is what the project is basically all about beginning to work and to think about how we might create a teacher training course for people who are experienced language teachers, so this is not for .. teachers, but this is for language teachers who have got experience. They are expected to have an equivalent of a European Driving license type certificate level of computer awareness, they are able to use the Internet, email, that kind of thing, but then we are putting that together that experience as language teacher with that technological experience and then exploring these new environment.

So that is fundamentally what this is all about. So I am going to transfer you to Christian Swertz who will talk a little bit about the background.... (End of Transcript)

Gary Motteram