Joan-Tomàs Pujolà
University of Barcelona
Place: Room 31
The COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in March 2020 generated an education crisis. Overnight, most educational institutions were forced to transform from face-to-face to online teaching. This caused disruption, destabilization and disorganization across all levels and sectors of the education system; it was complete mayhem. Nevertheless, teachers made strenuous efforts to adapt to the new teaching situation, more often than not struggling with technical and pedagogical issues.
As this temporary disturbance has been slowly disappearing, now is the time to reflect upon this abrupt transformation that found most of us unprepared and to start thinking about how to cope with the new language teaching reality if we are to continue teaching online.
This plenary session will tackle such issues, promoting the idea that rather than adapting to technologies language teachers should think how to integrate them meaningfully in their (new) teaching context.
Dr Joan-Tomàs Pujolà holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is a senior lecturer at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Education of the Faculty of Education, University of Barcelona (UB). His research focuses on various topics related to Computer Assisted Language Learning. Recently, he has been working on researching innovative methodologies to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages such as the implementation of mobile learning, PLEs, flipped classroom, and gamification. He is also currently collaborating on two Erasmus + projects: ProPIC that focuses on the use of technology for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and PRINTeL which aims to promote innovation in teaching & learning developing teachers' digital competence.