ESSARP Conference: the Active Learning Conference.
As it happens every year, the first weekend in September the ESSARP Conference takes place, the prime learning English speaking event in Latin America.
Working together with Hexacta, a leading software provider in Argentina, and IBM, The Learnerspace developed a web-based app that allowed participants to take notes during the conference, selecting each of the talks and jotting down their notes via the web interface.
Concurrently, speakers´ speech was decoded into text and, utilizing IBM Watson’s natural language processing engine, one of the world’s most advanced engines of its type, the system summarized, performed sentiment and personality analysis both for the speaker as well as the audience, comparing them in real-time.
Talks at Colegio San Bartolomé
Invited by the Churchill Foundation, The Learnerspace presented two talks to teachers and administrators at Colegio San Bartolomé, one of the most traditional and innovative schools in Rosario. Working with teachers from all three levels of the school, we embarked on a virtual school of some of the best schools in the world and then went through the challenges and opportunities of education for the future at this very special moment in the history of education.
Design Learning @ ABSCH
On August 27 we held a Design Learning workshop in Santiago, Chile, where we worked with senior teachers and administrators from schools in the ABSCH, Association of British Schools in Chile. Starting from a real-life problem, the design of a new interschool event for the Association, participants researched, collaborated, applied their creativity and critical thinking to designing a collaborative project that will be developed next year with participating schools.
Education Summit Lenovo at Paracas, Perú
The Learnerspace was invited to deliver a workshop at the education Summit organized by Lenovo in Paracas, Perú, where we demonstrated the use of our Lenovo Learnerspace platform, and reviewed some of the best schools in the world as well as the challenges facing education at this juncture in a redefined education paradigm.
We also focused on project-based learning as a mainstream application for modern pedagogy, and how design could become an important tool in developing higher order thinking and creative skills. We worked with heads of IT departments from schools and universities, as well as administrators and teachers from schools and universities in Peru.
3-D Design Workshop with Ricoh and UAI
Utilizing our Design Learning protocol, we implemented back to back 3-D design workshops, one involving high school students and the other one teachers and principals from schools in the Buenos Aires area, at the 3-D design lab that Ricoh has set up at the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (UAI)
3G Smart Conversations
At The Learnerspace we work to make true on one of the principles of the new educational paradigm: that we all learn from each other, and, most importantly, in professional development instances there is no longer such a thing as a passive audience. We believe in the value of providing conference attendees with a way to actively engage with speakers in co-constructing knowledge.
3G Smartgroup sponsors the Smart Conversations, an open forum to discuss some of the latest trends and tendencies in education, with a particular focus on space, and how a renewed and innovative use of spaces may result in advanced pedagogies.
At the 2018 edition of the Smart Conversations, we worked with participants in the keynote panel so that the same discussion that they engaged in was first discussed by conference attendees. Their reflections and the public’s where then run through an AI engine which analyzed semantic topics and personality.
Then, during the panel itself, the public acted as another speaker, and in real-time they participated with the speakers in answering the same questions that they were discussing at the panel, through different interactivities.
IBM Educathon
More than 45 students and their teachers from schools in Buenos Aires worked together at IBM in Martínez to design exciting educational projects incorporating some of the latest trends in education, after having visited and learned about the latest advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and experienced firsthand some of the IBM Watson applications at the IBM research labs.
Teams made up of teachers and students worked together using our Design Learning protocol to come up with conceptual ideas for these projects whilst also hearing firsthand from some of the IBM researchers and experts.
Design Learning at Holy Trinity College
As the kickoff event for the 2019 academic year, The Learnerspace worked with Holy Trinity College in Mar del Plata to launch their planning process. Through our planning by design workshop, teachers were able to learn about the main drivers for education, discern how to best summarize these drivers to serve as the foundations for their annual planning, started generating innovative activities in collaborative design to be implemented this same year.
We created an ad hoc portal that serves both as a collaborative platform as well as an online source for documenting their process.
Lenovo Educational Summit
Working together with Lenovo, The Learnerspace developed a new and unique event, an Education Summit which convened more than 50 heads of schools and leaders of education organizations, who spent two days and one night at a hotel in Areco to learn together and design collaborative projects related to the future of education.
Sponsored by Microsoft, Intel and Lenovo, and taking advantage of the beautiful natural setting, through walks, interactivities, reflections, and a joint creative process which fostered a unique environment, participants then collaborated using Lenovo technology in order to come up with innovative projects that they will follow through in the year as a way for education leaders to collaborate in pushing forward the agenda for relevant and engaging implementation of educational technology in our schools.
At this opportunity, we presented for the first time ever our Lenovo Learnerspace software, a project-based learning collaborative online platform that we are developing and which will be exclusively marketed by Lenovo.
Project-based learning at Lenovo Summit in Colombia
As part of our ongoing collaboration with Lenovo, we presented the Lenovo Learnerspace at the Education Summit that took place in Santa Marta, Colombia, within a keynote address that included a hands-on demonstration, working with schools and university leaders from all over Colombia.
The Leader’s Journey at LCEEQ retreat in Montréal
Every year, the Leadership Committee for English Education in Québec (LCEEQ), organizes a retreat for new, aspiring and experienced leaders at the beautiful Auberge des Gallants, a picturesque country inn an hour away from Montréal in Québec, Canada.
The Learnerspace delivered a one-day Leader’s journey workshop, in the beautiful snowed maple tree country surrounding the inn, working with the natural elements, technology interactivities, symbolic rituals and reflections in what was a unique journey to experience how leadership can become a wonderful opportunity for personal growth.
ESSARP Retreat for Student Leaders
As we have been doing for the past six years, we worked with Juan Pablo Ventura, Sofía Sengenberger, Daniel Vilasetru and world renowned speaker Ben Walden to deliver a three-day Leader’s Journey retreat for secondary school student leaders in the beautiful setting of La Reserva in Capilla del Señor.
Through a unique set of reflections, rituals, hands-on activities, games and the incomparable Shakespeare related leadership content from Ben Walden, students experienced how leadership is much more than being effective and lived through three days that will make an indelible impact on their current roles and future leadership opportunities.
IBM Watson at the ESSARP Conference
We are currently collaborating with IBM in using their world-class Watson AI engine to develop a new and innovative conference app that we will be running at the ESSARP Conference.
Conference attendees will be able to actively engage with speakers, and using conceptual summarization and sentiment analysis will be able to re-signify what speakers share with participants, and take part in a series of hands-on learning sessions for this first of its type active learning conference.
Stay tuned for more information.
Designing the future with Steelcase
Coming up, now in April, we are collaborating with Steelcase, one of the world’s leading producers of innovative educational furniture, to work with school leaders through a design workshop that will reinterpret education trends and tendencies through artistic creations that allow them to experience firsthand a student centered learning project as well as how design and art can actually become powerful conceptualizations leading to the development of higher order thinking skills.
IBM Educathon powered by The Learnerspace.
Teams of students and teachers from around 30 schools work for a full day on developing state-of-the-art educational projects utilizing some of the motives and components offered by IBM Watson. During this fun filled, exciting and action-packed day, students and their teachers reflected on the new modes of learning, toured IBM facilities, and listen to inspiring talks by IBM researchers, programmers, as well as interacted with Emma, their 3D printed Watson powered robot, the star feature of the IBM labs.
3G Smart Conversations
At the 3G Smart Conversations event in Buenos Aires, The Learnerspace developed some technology participation tools for speakers to interact amongst themselves prior to a public panel held that this conference that gathered around 150 education professionals from all over the city and various education sectors. We then devised a series of interactivities that allowed the event participants to be the fifth speaker in a panel. The event featured a panel of educational speakers, who discussed various aspects related to change and innovation in education, and the public became actively engaged in the discussion by using their personal devices and crowdsourcing ideas and thoughts regarding education as if they were another speaker.
This made for an unprecedented level of interaction with what is known as “the former audience”, which signifies that the audience is no longer a passive recipient of ideas but rather an active contributor enriching the discussion and generating much greater engagement.
Design Learning @ Sunrise
The Learnerspace ran a full day Design Learning workshop at one of the leading schools in the South of Argentina, Sunrise School in Cipoletti, Rio Negro. Over 100 staff members collaborated in designing a water purifier as a real-life example of an interdisciplinary design problem via our own design learning online protocol.
ESSARP new interschool event
Over 50 heads of schools took part in a half-day design learning workshop where they were challenged to tackle a real-life interdisciplinary design problem that was relevant to the school association: designing a new interschool event.
Education leaders played, investigated, collaborated and learn from each other within an innovative educational environment and eventually gave birth to a new interschool event, a project-based interschool learning experience that will be carried out in 2019.
To top it off, we were very fortunate and grateful to have Rosan Bosch, the world’s leading designer of educational spaces, sharing some of her insights on the importance and relevance of interior spaces pedagogy, and answering questions from the audience.
Professional development at The Global School
As part of our long-term commitment towards engineering a profound school transformation, we ran professional development workshops at The Global School, researching and transforming a unit of study from a topic contributed by participants themselves, as a way to embody a completely new learning modality, utilizing a shared blog that documented all of these group interactions.