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By Rachid Khouya
Morocco World News
Marrakech, February 14, 2012
The British Council, MATE and the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (LT-SIG) organized the 1st International Conference on ICT in Education in Marrakech, Morocco from 8-11 February 2012 under the theme: Opportunities, Challenges and Practical Solutions for the Integration of ICT in Education.
The conference, which was attended by more than 200 teachers, teacher trainers, supervisors, editors, course designers, national and international experts, reflected the growing interest in the use of new technologies in the field of teaching and the motivation of teachers to develop their skills and interests like the use of corpora, multimedia, computer mediated communication, text-based software, authoring, the web, interactive whiteboards and other technical issues.
For four days, teachers and educational representatives had the opportunity to share best practices with colleagues from around the world. Teachers and learners had the chance to develop their skills through engaging in open and rich educational and cultural discussions with experts so as to benefit from their knowledge and maximize the possibilities of exploring the use of ICT in language pedagogy. In other words, the conference offered basic ICT skills for the twenty-first century educators.
According to the organizing committee and many participants, the conference was extremely successful in attaining its objectives. The objectives were to raise awareness among EFL professionals of the power of using technologies to assist with learning language, to contribute to the knowledge base of how technologies can be used for English learners, to develop members’ expertise in the myriad of uses of technologies with their language students, and to tap into the knowledge and network of international ICT specialists in areas of local concern.
Accordingly, the conference included workshops, different topics and presentations by professionals from universities in Europe, America, Asia and Africa.
As technology offers new ways of communicating, learning and teaching, the conference sensitized teachers to the importance of incorporating these new ways in their social and communicative techniques so as to guarantee learner engagement and motivation through creating opportunities for collaboration, interaction and communication in a world that is universally digitally connected.
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