At First all the experts introduced themselves. The experts were Kalyan Chattopadhyay from India, Valeria Franca from Brazil, Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou from Greece, Nik Peachey from the UK, Graham Stanley from Spain and Vance Stevens from Abu Dhabi. The discussion was monitored by Gavin Dudeney.

Graham Stanley began an on-line talk asking a question: ‘Where are we now with education technology?’ Valeria Franca replied that in Brazil the biggest problem was with the options which were available for teachers or not, whether the teachers had access to the education technologies or not.

Nik Peachey expressed his idea of education technology. Nik stated that he has mixed experience of working with teachers. In his opinion we are still dealing with the teachers who haven’t used education technology in teaching yet. Although there are teachers who use education technology a lot.

Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou said that they made huge progress in Cyprus.  They’ve done a lot and reached huge improvements, schools are well-equipped. But, of course, technology is not implemented as widely as they wanted it to be. In Cyprus they’re preparing a lot of materials for teachers in order to help them implement the technologies. Sophie stressed the methodological side of the question.

Kalyan Chattopadhyay talked about his experience of working in India. Some schools don’t have hardware, access to Internet is limited, so teachers don’t have access to Internet in some schools. Students on the contrary have Internet access and use mobile technology a lot. As For higher education sector universities are well-equipped but teachers are not trained sufficiently. Young teachers are more interested in using education technology. Kalyan mentioned Digital Language Lab that provides some training for teachers. As for SNS people mainly use them in informal context.

Vance Stevens spoke about some resistance that is still among some teachers. He also stressed the importance of the content in Web 2. At the moment he is writing some materials on tools that teachers can use in order to teach students to use these technologies.

The next question concerned IWB and mobile technology. Valeria Franca said that many language schools started to use IWB about 3 years ago in Brazil. Teaching is vitally important that’s why we should take into account what we shall teach the teachers and in what way. When they decided to use IWB, they thought about classroom dynamics, IWB effective use, to which extent they should be used in classroom, what resources to use. Valeria emphasized the importance of reflection on how to make it effective in the classroom. The introduction of IWB was quite dramatic in Brazil. But nowadays new teachers come and they know how to use an IWB. We should constantly think how we can use it more effectively in the classroom. As for the role of mobile learning it is also very crucial in ELT.

Nik Peachey has mixed feelings about an IWB. But in some situations the training stage was missed. He uses mobile technology widely. In contrast to IWB mobile technology offers more opportunities for using learner-centred approach.
Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou agreed completely with Valeria’s concepts. The main issue is that sometimes when teachers use education technology, their lessons are still teacher-centred. That’s why the key issue is how to change teacher-centred lessons into learner-centred ones.

Kalyan Chattopadhyay added that technology should be in the hands of technology users. The problem with technology is that we should think about the context. In the UK all schools and universities have IWB, but not all the teachers use them, because some of them don’t need it.

In conclusion it should be mentioned that all the experts stressed the importance of teacher training. Nowadays most of the schools and universities have all the necessary equipment for using technology, but teachers don’t use it to its potential.