Discovery Demos - See and Try New Tools and Solutions

Dr Michelle Selinger has extensive experience helping governments and educational institutions around the world in both developed and emerging economies to create and evaluate strategies for technology enhanced education reform. She has an academic background in digital education in both campus-based and distance education.

She was responsible for technology across the curriculum in the Open University’s distance taught initial teacher education programme and led pioneering work on teacher collaboration. She led the Centre for New Technology Research in Education at the University of Warwick, and then took the role of lead education consultant for Cisco Systems Corporate Affairs and then Cisco Consultancy Services.

In 2013 Michelle set up an independent consultancy carrying out research and development work for companies like Intel and Pearson, and for the Queen Rania Foundation, Jordan. Latterly she has worked with the consultancy EdTech Ventures on research for Microsoft and HP Inc.

Links

http://edtech-ventures.com/

Links

http://www.oulu.fi

Links

http://www.mobile-university.de

Olivier Heidmann is lead developer and designer in serious games projects, responsible for designing and creating virtual experiment demonstrators.

He has a Master Degree in Parallel Computing from the Louis Pasteur University of Strasbourg, France.

He also taught computer science, mathematics and management to students ranging from 14 years old to adults for 7 years.

Since 2004, he participated in more than twenty different EC-funded projects, using ICT and web-based solutions to enhance the teaching and learning methodologies and tools. He has published several papers at international conferences over the past 10 years.

Hariklia Tsalapatas is a software engineer at the University of Thessaly, Greece since 2000. She has a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece (1990), an MSc Degree in Computer Science from Rice University, Houston, TX (1994), and an MBA from London Business School (2005). She has been working on ICT in education since 2000 focusing on combining technology with emerging learning methodologies including active, experiential, explorative, and collaborative learning. Over the past 6 years she has been active on serious games in education, mobile learning, and community-based learning. She has participated in 20 EU funded projects since 2000 several of which she has coordinated. She has published approximately 40 publications in the same timeframe. Earlier engagements inlcude working as a researcher at the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion Crete (1998-2000) and as a network engineer for Oracle corporation, SF, California (1993-1997).

Links

http://www.uth.gr

Erin strives to ignite a passion for creativity and innovation in our youth by empowering them with the knowledge and know how to create with, rather than just consume technology.  She obtained a Masters Degree in Instructional Technology from Duquesne University and has served as a Technology Integration Specialist and a Computer Science teacher for a school outside of Pittsburgh. She is now the Program Manager for CMU CS Academy, a new project at Carnegie Mellon University developing a novel, world-class, online, interactive high school computer science curriculum free for all to use. 

Links

http://academy.cs.cmu.edu

Mohammed is a Dutch educator with a background in technology, IT, design, and technics.  

Innovation for educational drives the work Mohammed does, he recognizes problems and makes it his mission to solve them. By using existing technology, creating new tools and connecting these he creates new exciting educational solutions that improve the way we learn and teach. In the development of this, the didactical value is key. 

Mohammed is part of a team that participated, over the last years, in several national and international projects related to the use of IT in Education. This team is responsible for developing the first method of the use of synchronous coaching, creating software and hardware and schooling educational professionals in this method. 

SynCoach is a product based on Mohammeds insight into the possibilities of combining the method in a new application with a addition of an 360 degree camera. This is just the beginning of a whole carreer creative developping! 

Links

http://www.fontys.nl

Professor Laura Czerniewicz is the Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. 

She has worked in education in numerous roles including strategist, researcher, educator and publisher. Her research interests include the changing nature of higher education in a digitally-mediated society, changing technological practices and digital inequality. She has also played a key strategic and scholarly role in the areas of blended and online education as well as open education. 

An NRF-rated researcher, Laura has published widely, both formally and informally. Her research output can be found at  http://uct.academia.edu/LauraCzerniewicz and many of her presentations at https://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz.

She can be followed on Twitter at @czernie. For a recent interview with Laura Czerniewicz listen to her podcast at http://onlinelearninglegends.com/podcast/007-professor-laura-czerniewicz/. 

Links

http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/about/la…

Dr. Benoît Bossavit is a recent postdoc fellow at Trinity College Dublin funded from the EU H2020 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career-FIT programme with Entreprise Ireland. Benoît passed his Msc in Computer Science at Bordeaux (France) where he specialized in Virtual Reality technology. He polished his technical skills working at the research institute INRIA for three years where he was involved in the development of three different research projects. Afterwards, Benoît did his PhD at the Public University of Navarre (Spain) where he explored the potential of Natural User Interfaces (body motion-based interaction techniques) in different educational contexts such as severe cognitive and motor disabilities, high functioning autism and typically developing children. He adopted different design methodologies to involve stakeholders (teachers and children) in the design and development of educational games. Alike most of the research in the field, he sought for educational tools to help and support children with Special Educational Needs by focusing on cognitive skills explicitly, considering the use of the body as a mean. However, the use of the body also plays an integral part in the development process of children, and the use of technology to early detect potential developmental disabilities remains underexplored. And that is where he is focusing his research now.

Martin Steinicke (*1981) is a researcher in professor Carsten Busch´s R&D group Creative Media at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin. He works in the application centre „creative Applied Interactive Technologies“ to support SMEs in tackling the challenges of the digitization as well as the opening up of new markets and technologies. Furthermore, he primarily does research on the application of game concepts (Gamification) and technologies (APITs) as well as their synthesis in digital game-based learning (DGBL). In his courses “Game & Interaction Design” and “Digital Game-based Learning” Martin guides his students on their epic quest to create digital (learning) games and interventions.

Links

http://www.htw-berlin.de

Rosa Garcia Calero was born in San Sebastian, Spain. She has a University degree in Pharmacy, specialised in the field of  Dietetics and Nutrition Programmes, an MBA by a Madrid Business School and a Master Degree in Quality for Services. For 3 years she worked in institutions linked to the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and became a teacher in Vocational Education and Training Schools. In 1995 she started working as International Relationship Manager in the Spanish Association of Educational Centres (CECE). In CECE she helped other members to build an European Network of VET centres interested in developing new projects in the field of education, specially related with IT and Research Programmes. She became Vice-President of EFVET (European Forum of Vocational Education and Training) in Brussels. She was also member of the Administration Council of ELLI (European Lifelong Learning Initiative); Spanish Delegate of ESHA (European Secondary Heads Association), and member of other European Associations directly linked with education.

She helped many organizations  in launching innovative programmes in IT, e-learning and life-long learning in a wide range of subjects. She worked as Project Manager in different National and European projects and also worked as a partner, coordinating the participation of Spanish members in several European projects.

Since September 2000, Rosa García Calero works as independent, her tasks mainly as a project auditor in different projects related to e-learning, and has worked for the European Commission in different Programmes: evaluator and reviewer of the 5th and 6th Framework Programmes (IST and Quality of Life), evaluator of European Initiatives and evaluator of several programme of DGEAC, like Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, e-learning, etc. She organises training actions and seminars about European Project Management for companies and teachers in Spain. She has also worked for the Ministry of Education making audits of Leonardo da Vinci projects and being responsible of the quality control of the evaluation processes in different national call for proposals.

For 4 years, Rosa was the Responsible of Content of Online Educa Madrid, an annual Conference of e-learning held in Madrid, organized by ICWE GmbH (Berlin), being responsible of the programme and speakers. Actually she works in the Programme team of e-Learning Africa and Online Educa Berlin.

Links

http://www.e3-communications.com