rol of teachers

Overall, the EMOTE project aims to:

1. Research the role of pedagogical and empathic interventions in the process of engaging the learner and facilitating their learning progress;
2. Explore if and how the exchange of socio-emotional cues with an embodied tutor in a shared physical space can create a sense of connection and social bonding and act as a facilitator of the learning experience.

This will be done across different embodiments (both virtual and robotic), allowing for the effect that such embodiment will have on engagement and empathy to be explored.

Further, the project will support the migration of the artificial tutors across different embodiments, to support students' learning in both formal and informal settings.

To ground the research in a concrete classroom scenario, the EMOTE project will develop a showcase in the area of geography, focusing on environmental issues. This will enable tutors to be tested in real world school environments in different European countries.

In order to achieve these objectives, the EMOTE consortium will bring together experts to carry out interdisciplinary research on affect recognition, learner models, adaptive behaviour and embodiment for human-robot interaction in learning environments, grounded in psychological theories of emotion in social interaction and pedagogical models for learning facilitation.

eLearning refers to on-line learning delivered over the World Wide Web via the public Internet or the private, corporate intranet. The conference is intended to provide an overview of technologies, approaches, and trends that are happening right now. The constraints of e-learning are diminishing and options are increasing as the Web becomes increasingly easy to use and the technology becomes better and less expensive.

As the ease of execution increases, more and more institutions are discovering the benefits of delivering training via the Web. Interest in e-learning is at an all-time high, and the workshop wants to serve as a stimulus to accelerate collaboration and dialog among the e-learning providers, trainers, IT researchers and the lifelong, self-directed learners. Such business trends as an increased global economy, the pressures for rapid development, and the necessity of teamwork are shaping the present state and the future of eLearning.

Employees are increasingly aware that they must continue to update and advance their skills if they want to understand the state-of-the-art technologies and remain valuable to their organizations. This means that learners will be more and more self-directed, and they will want access to what they need when they need it. The Internet based educational materials and the e-learning providers have to meet this demand.

The conference focuses on the latest trends in e-learning and also on the latest IT technology alternatives that are poised to become mainstream strategies in the near future and will influence the e-learning environment. Ubiquitous systems proliferate quickly due to the latest achievements in the industry of telecommunications, electronics, wireless, and economical globalization.

Wireless and mobility allow any user to timely use resources using various access technologies under (assumed) secured and guaranteed privacy. The family of the mobile devices expand dramatically, allowing a user to have a portable office everywhere, every time. Mobile learning became a fact, due to the technical accessibility and Internet communications. Many online classes, learning systems, university curricula, remote education, and virtual training classes are now part of the corporate education and use.

Progress is made in user modeling and adaptive learning models. The generalization of successful practices on mobile learning is favored by many national and international projects and policy synchronization boards. Adaptation implies also the use of the classical methods, still in use and useful in some contexts and for some categories of users. Hybrid learning is an increasing trend in education today. The traditional classroom learning has been historically proven beneficial. Hybrid learning is rather a series of different learning strategies going from teacher-centric to student-centric. This improves the critical thinking, creativity, self-management, self-study, and advance problem solving thinking of the student.

We solicit both academic, research, and industrial contributions. We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.

Industrial presentations are not subject to the format and content constraints of regular submissions. We expect short and long presentations that express industrial position and status.

Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.

All topics and submission formats are open to both research and industry contributions. You can check them all here.

Strand 1:  Classroom 2.0 - The Changing Nature of the Classroom
Strand Tag: "classroom 2.0"
Example Topics:

• Social media in classroom
• 1:1 / BYOD programs
• Flipped Classrooms
• Digital Writing
• Digital Literacies / Search Literacies
• Makerspaces
• Gaming in Education
• Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Digital Textbooks
• Changes to teaching specific subjects: e.g., Math 2.0

Strand 2:  Student 2.0 - Changes to Student Learning
Strand Tag: "student 2.0"
Example Topics:

• Individualized / personalized learning
• The learner as agent
• Student-directed learning
• Hacking education
• Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) for Students
• Personal learning or success plans
• ePortfolios
• Resume 2.0
• Personal websites and "branding"
• Building a digital presence

Strand 3:  Teacher 2.0 - Personal and Professional Development
Strand Tag: "teacher 2.0"
Example Topics:

• The teacher as lead learner
• Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and Personal Learning Communities (PLCs)
• Peer Professional Development (PD)
• Open PD
• Self-directed PD
• Passion-based teaching
• Schools of Education 2.0

Strand 4:  School 2.0 - The Where, When, and How of Formal Learning
Strand Tag: "school 2.0"
Example Topics:

• Virtual and online schooling
• Blended learning
• Mobile learning
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Immersive environments
• Alternative Education Models (homeschooling, unschooling, Democratic schooling)
• School leadership
• Schools as community hubs
• Education reform
• Disruptive innovation
• Solving digital divides
• Architecture and learning Spaces
• Educational entrepreneurship
• Big data and data analytics
• Assessment models

Strand 5:  Pedagogy - Re-evaluating Teaching and Learning Methods
Strand Tag: "pedagogy"
Example Topics:

• From teaching to learning
• Social Learning
• Social / educational networking
• Passion-based learning
• Technology and pedagogy
• Learning how to learn
• Brain-based (cognitive) learning

The G8 Heads of State concur and acknowledge the role that information and communication technology (ICT) can play in supporting educational improvement. The UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers project is developed in support of these priorities.

The goal of the “ICT Competency Framework for Teachers” (ICT-CFT) project is to improve teachers’ practice. However, the Framework do not merely focus on ICT skills. By combining ICT skills with emergent views in pedagogy, curriculum, and school organization, the framework is designed for the professional development of teachers who want to use ICT skills and resources to improve their teaching, collaborate with colleagues, and perhaps ultimately become innovation leaders in their institutions. The overall objective of the project is to improve teacher practice in a way that contributes to a higher quality education system that can, in turn, produce a better informed citizenry and higher quality workforce that can, as a result, advance a country’s economic and social development.

More specifically, the objectives of the ICT-CFT project are:

• to constitute a common core syllabus (defining various ICT competency skills for teachers) that professional development providers can use to develop learning materials sharable at a global level;
• to provide a basic set of qualifications that allows teachers to integrate ICT into their teaching;
• to extend teachers’ professional development so as to advance their skills in pedagogy, collaboration, and school innovation using ICTs;
• to harmonize different views and vocabulary regarding the uses of ICTs in teacher education.

While the UNESCO ICT-CFT project specifies the competencies needed to implement these changes, it will be up to approved governmental, non-governmental, and private providers to deliver the training for these competencies. The project also includes a mechanism for reviewing and approving the curricula and course offerings of these providers.

Economists identify three factors that lead to growth based on increased productivity: capital deepening (the use of equipment that is more productive than earlier versions), higher quality labor (a more knowledgeable workforce that is more productive), and technological innovation—the creation, distribution, and use of new knowledge. These three productivity factors serve as the basis for three complementary, somewhat overlapping approaches that connect education policy with economic development:

• increase the technological uptake of the workforce by incorporating technology skills in the curriculum — or the technology literacy approach;
• increase the ability of the workforce to use knowledge to add value to economic output by applying it to solve complex, real-world problems — or the knowledge deepening approach.
• increase the ability of the workforce to innovate and produce new knowledge and of citizens to benefit from this new knowledge — or the knowledge creation approach.

These three approaches correspond to alternative policy goals and visions for the future and together they provide a developmental trajectory by which education reform supports increasingly sophisticated ways of developing a country’s economy and society: from technology uptake, to a high performance workforce, to a knowledge economy and information society. Moving across the approaches, a country’s students and ultimately its workforce and citizenry acquire increasingly sophisticated skills needed to support economic growth and an improved standard of living.

The UNESCO ICT-CFT project encompasses all three of these approaches to educational change, so as to address different policy goals and visions. But each approach has different implications for education reform and improvement. Each has different implications for components of the education system: pedagogy, teacher practice and professional development, curriculum and assessment, and school organization and administration. And ICT plays a different role in each of these approaches.

Teacher professional development has been shown to be a particularly important component of educational improvement but only if professional development is focused on specific changes in teacher classroom behaviors and particularly if it is aligned with other changes in the educational system. The UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers play out the implications that each of the three education improvement approaches have for changes in each of the components of the educational system: Policy, curriculum and assessment, pedagogy, the use of technology, school organization and administration, and teacher professional development.