Thursday, October 29, 2009

First Virtual Round Table Conference


About the Virtual Round Table
The Virtual Round Table conference is a live online conference dedicated to language learning with technology. It is aimed at educators and language teaching professionals in language schools, institutes or other language related organisations.

It purposes to introduce to its participants a number of tools and best practises on how to use these tools in class for the benefit of our language learners.

With so many tools around, often the very decision on ‘how to use which tool’ for creating blended learning experiences or for selecting digital teaching and learning material and also for building a web-presence and using tools for online marketing are difficult and time-consuming and pales the efforts of learning the tools into insignificance.

During this conference these issues will openly be discussed by small groups of experts in certain fields of technology so that the participants will be equipped with solid information so as to be able to make informed decisions.

Who is the conference for?
The conference is for all those interested in language specific ….

· web-based or software based applications
· digital teaching and learning material
· electronic or digital tools
· mobile learning applications
· digital classroom management
· live online environments, virtual classrooms and virtual worlds
· and all other aspects of language learning with technology

This includes language trainers educators and mangement of language schools or institutes, freelancers and any other language teaching professionals.

Venues
Virtual classrooms (Adobe Connect Pro) and Second Life.

Conference themes
Theme 1: Best practises
Theme 2: Trendsetting
Theme 3: Online Marketing and Networking
Theme 4: Classroom management, administration and training
BONUS theme 5: On demand guest speaker

Event Schedule
October 31, 2009 deadline for submissions
November 5-6, 2009 presenter rehearsals
November 12-13, 2009 conference (Thu, Fri)

Conference Structure
The conference will be held on Thursday or Friday, 12-13 November with 4 main panel discussions (virtual round table discussions) of 90min each scheduled at different times to meet the main time zones: Europea, America, Asia.

The sessions in between those virtual round tables will be workshops or product presentations or individual presentations and there will also be plenty of breaks between the sessions.

The formats of the sessions will be
- 90min virtual round table discussions with 2 or 3 experts, each presenting a brief pecha kucha* or PRESTO** presentation followed by a learning conversation
- 60min hands-on workshops or showcases delivered by individuals
- virtual exhibition in Second Life with poster sessions (throughout) with exhibition tours planned
- ‘external links’ collection wiki for research and development in the field of language learning with technnology
For more information on the conference please click here. The program will be announced also on this NING site shortly.

Registration
To register for the conference please sign-up on our ning site and as soon as the schedule is announced we may ask you to sign up at each individual session you wish to attend. http://virtual-round-table.ning.com website.

Sponsorship
If you wish to be a sponsor for this conference please send an email to heike.philp [at] lancelotschool.com.
For a list to all sponsors, click here

Contact Information
Please contact Holly Longstroth or Heike Philp at LANCELOT School GmbH, holly.longstroth [at] lancelotschool.com and heike.philp [at] lancelotschool.com.

Are you blogging or tweeting?
Please us the tag vrt09 or the hashtag #vrt09 for the conference.

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