iTILT partner the British Council has finished the first of two training sessions for teachers at Col.legio Europa in Sant Cugat. There were 43 teachers present for the training session, and after an introduction to the project, we concentrated on helping the teachers use the Hitachi Starboard software based on the guidelines in the iTILT handbook.

The teachers were a mixed group of Catalan, Spanish, English, French and German teachers. There were some who are teaching CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and even some others who have nothing to do with language teaching (there was a P.E teacher, for example), but who were interested in learning a bit more about using the IWB in a moire interactive way. what was true of most of the teachers was that they had so far used the IWB as a projector to present concepts, access websites and display videos, but the great majority of them had little or no experience of using the IWB software.

This is why we are doing two training sessions for them The first one concentrated on showing the teachers how to effectively use features such as drag-and-drop, the spotlight, blind and other tools useful for classroom activities. We also showed some of the iTILT flipcharts to illustrate how materials could be put togethe, presented and used well in the language classroom. The second session will be more hands-on, with the teachers using the software to create their own activities for use in an upcoming class.

We were very pleased at how the training session was received, and were thrilled that a couple of the teachers (both CLIL teachers) have already volunteered to have their classes filmed and to take a more active part in the iTILT project.

Image (left) A teacher from the Europa School uses the board pen for the very first time!

Image (above right) Getting to grips with the board