Hornby Regional Summer School:Learning, Sharing, Networking

by Ronaldo Lima Jr

Bio: Ronaldo Lima Jr holds an MA in Applied Linguistics (Universidade de Brasília) and is a Linguistics PhD student (Universidade de Brasília). One of his main interests is technology-enhanced language learning/teaching. He currently works as an EFL teacher and a member of the EdTech Team at the binational center Casa Thomas Jefferson (Brasília, Brazil) and you can follow him online at http://ihopeitworks.blogspot.com, http://brazilbridges.net and as “ronaldojunior” on Twitter.



Between January 20 and January 30, 26 teachers and teacher trainers from 7 Latin American countries met in Sán Nicolás, Argentina, for the Hornby Regional Summer School, whose theme was “Mind the Gap: new technologies and teacher training”. The participants were from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela and the course was funded by the British Council and the Hornby Educational Trust.

Led by the course director Gavin Dudeney (Spain) and the academic tutor Nik Peachey (Morocco), the participants had the chance to explore different web tools that can be used in the language classroom. The mornings were used for input sessions, which fostered enough curiosity to make the hands-on afternoon practice rather effective. On the last day, participants were encouraged to come up with action plans to be taken throughout 2009 and, by sharing their resolutions, they proved the fruitfulness of these days of networking.


Along with Ana Falcao (Brazil) and Pedro Castro (Cuba), I was invited to be a speaker, delivering one session about “Using Text Online”. I decided to explore the educational uses of blogs, wikis and google docs and started my session by letting participants choose which of these three tools would be of greatest interest for them and, even though all participants had already had experiences with at least one of the tools, wikis was a virtually unanimous choice, so here is a little bit of the session for the readers who could not attend the school:

The word wiki means quick in Hawaiian and is the word used to describe a type of webpage that allows multiple editing. The key behind a wiki is collaboration. Take Wikipedia, for instance. It is the largest encyclopedia today and it was written (and is still being written) by internet users. There are many wiki hosts nowadays that allow anybody to create a wiki for free from scratch and then invite other people to read it or collaborate with it. There are three basic permission levels you can choose when building a wiki:

· Fully public: any visitor can read and edit your wiki;
· Partially public: any visitor can read your wiki, but only invited or authorized authors can edit it (this is the usual default setting);
· Fully private: only invited or authorized visitors can read and/or edit your wiki.

There are many educational uses for wikis, for example:

· Teacher trainers can build wikis to keep their training sessions in the same place, allowing trainees access and revisit the training session (ex: http://brazilbridges.net/) after is has been delivered. One great advantage of this use is that teacher trainers that are going to deliver sessions together can plan and prepare the sessions in different physical places, just by editing the wiki together;
· Teachers could use wikis for process writing activities, since the nature of wikis is very much parallel to the nature of process writing: drafting, revising, having peers review, editing and publishing the final work (ex: http://practicalwriting.pbwiki.com/);
· Teachers and teacher trainers may have a wiki to advertise some project and/or ask for collaboration in that project (ex: http://strategiesproject.pbwiki.com/);
· Wikis might be useful for discussing specific webtools and how they can be used in language learning/teaching (ex: http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/).

All in all, as any other webtool, wikis have been used for various purposes, according to teachers’ creativity, which seems to be endless and unlimited. It is just a matter of overcoming a possible fear of the unknown, learn the basics and dive into this technological possibility.

You can check out the blogs and wikis created by the Hornby School participants on my blog (http://ihopeitworks.blogspot.com/) in the post entitled “Hornby Summer School – Sán Nicolás Argentina”.

Post about the event by Gavin Dudeney HERE