The eLearning Alliance would like to invite you to attend this networking event.

Background

The teaching of spoken language skills is generally considered to be difficult.

In 2007, in an attempt to promote the use of oral Irish language, the Irish Minister for Education and Science announced a significant change to the proportion of marks awarded for oral (spoken) Irish in the State examinations.

Further to this, Learnosity worked as technology partner in an exciting mobile learning project initiated by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE) and the governing body for the Irish language (Foras na Gaeilge).

One of the aims of the mobile learning pilot project was to ascertain whether ICT, including mobile technology, could facilitate oral learning and assessment. This project was very successful, and continued in the following years. (http://bit.ly/ncca).

This mobile language learning platform has since been deployed in a large-scale pilot project conducted by the Australian government, in the teaching and learning of the Indonesian language. Students involved in this project showed significant improvements in spoken language abilities. The results of this project (http://bit.ly/tlf-mall) will be outlined in the presentation.

With oral language fluency of the utmost importance to secondary language acquisition, these projects focus on verbal abilities, allowing students to use any phone to dial into a voice application, and answer a series of voice-based questions. It also allows students to communicate 1-2-1 in real time (using voice or text), allowing them to use the target language in role-plays based on real life scenarios.

The session will also include the opportunity to participate in a live hands-on demonstration of the assessment tools.

Facilitator

Gavin Cooney is founder and CEO of Learnosity, an award winning specialist e-learning solutions provider working with major public and private sector clients worldwide.

Gavin worked closely with the Irish and Australian federal governments, to develop an innovative phone based platform used in the learning and assessment of spoken language skills, as well as a number of vocational applications. This has been deployed in an ever increasing list of countries including Ireland, USA, Australia, the UK, and Saudi Arabia.

Gavin is passionate about both education and technology, and strives to continue to develop systems using the very latest technologies and learning & assessment approaches in a practical and scalable way.

Prior to founding Learnosity, Gavin lectured Information Systems in University College Dublin.

Cost

Members:- Free

Non-members:- £50 + VAT