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[Music] B [Music] at
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so I'll switch into English now sorry for my French I understand but I cannot I don't feel confident enough to make a presentation in French um first of all uh I would like
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you um you all to stand up for a second please and if this uh this is just an excuse to send a picture of you all uh back to
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Uruguay so I'll make a selfie [Laughter] [Applause] if thank you and it's also an excuse uh for you to have your bloodstream a
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little bit like renovated after all these presentations um so I will have to do some effort in uh situating ugu ugu is located in South
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America as Atlantic Coast it's twice the size of Portugal but we we are less populated we have a smaller population it's 3.5 million inhabitants and around
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12 million cows so it's yeah more than more than three cows per person uh so 91% of the homes have internet access 30 7
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72% uh have high-speed internet connection 83% of the population use the internet daily and 21% of the 's home own a seal device so seal the agency I I
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I run I am the President of the board of that agency has been around since 2007 and it's it started as the first implementation of the one laptop per child program in Uruguay and in many places in in many
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International forums it's been celebrated as the only place where it was successful and I want to say that that's not true uh in Europe white it wasn't successful at the beginning the
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only reason uh it's depicted as as if it was successful is because we transformed it in what it is today the national Innovation Agency for Education technology of the uan uh government the
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uan state so I want to share some uh numbers with you not uh to show off that would be very Argentinian and I am ugan but it
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it's just to put some context into uh how ugai is different in the region and some of the accomplishment that saal made uh were possible because of these
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country's characteristics so let um uran has the strongest Democratic system so it has the the the number one let's say Democratic um index uh in Latin America the best GDP
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GDP per capita the Gen index Prosperity index um in terms of digital government in term of a free country in respect to uh economic freedom 97% of the our the
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electricity we generate is comes from renewable sources um the digital quality of life index and the literacy rate all
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those uh characteristics made the story about of saal possible and the evolution of our digital transformation system to be
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successful so uwan uh education landscape it's kind of complex it's complicated we have a minister a Ministry of Education that
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doesn't run the schools in the everyday they today operations so we have a Ministry of Ministry of Education we have the national administration of public education that is called there
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like anep and then we have seal which is the national Innovation Agency for Education technology and all those three organizations are really important for the education landscape but they are
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autonomous and that was created and this is also one of the reasons why democracy in EUR is so strong for example the national administration of public education was created independent and
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autonomous from the Ministry of Education so that the Electoral blows were were not influencing education so much it's been very good in some aspects
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and it's been very complicated in another in other aspects because that autonomy sometimes creates isolation this sense that we can do uh everything
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without help from anyone else and we are the only people in charge of taking decisions in education and we know for a fact that that doesn't work so when all
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those circles converge the most then is when the education landscape in Uruguay works the best but it depends on every uh cycle of
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Elections so having said that it's very hard to put 16 years in um the shortest let's say talk possible so I am going to show you
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a video about this 16 years of evolution of saal lat ceing what many are calling a revolutionary new product the iPhone
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on college campuses it's called the Facebook the name you can't forget it's called Twitter you let me know when you're ready I am ready all right
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[Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] for for
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so we started to teach English by a video [Music] [Music] conference [Music] [Music]
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for [Music] for [Music] Cor [Music] [Music]
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conf [Music] so um as you can see saal is is more
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than uh just one laptop per child program it it began as a project to bridge the digital divide but it has evolved since then because we had this
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um Insight that the digital divide was like the matrioskas um dolls do you know those dolls that are one inside of each other so when we solved for connectivity for
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Access access to every single uh school kid to devices to comp computers then we saw that was enough wasn't enough there were some kids who weren't benefiting from those Technologies then we thought
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it should be connectivity we provided internet connection to every single School broadband internet connection to every single school and then that wasn't enough we provided platforms and that
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wasn't enough we provided dig digital citizenship programs and that wasn't enough so uh we see this um Equity uh problem and I am so glad that Elise um
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Jean Michelle and Philip uh were before me because it's so much easier to explain how complex it is to maintain quality while thinking about equity in
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terms to the access to the Future in an equitable way in all the country in EUR we have 500 schools 500 rural schools with 7,000 students so there are so many
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schools with one two or three students but in those schools we also need to be able to make uh learning English and learning computational thinking available and
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there's no way we can have enough teachers and with the video conferencing system that we deployed because of all this infrastructure we have universalized the teaching of English and the teaching of computational
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thinking at all the primary level um right now we have 100% of access to devices in in for our kids we don't not only give the devices but we
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repair the devices uh every single device that gets broken it's back in the hands of the student in less than three days and for that we had to create a repairing Network all around the country
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and that was not a technical decision that was a pedagogical decision we took that decision because we saw that teachers if teachers went into the classroom and saw that for example in a
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group of 20 kids six of them haven't the device working they wouldn't use technology to teach so we needed to have the the the devices available so that
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those skills could be uh available for our students um seal Works in Seal is it's weird because it's a government owned
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company so in the board of directors of this company it is a public company seats the minister of Education the president of the national administration of public education the Minister of
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Finance and myself as the president and that allows us to level the playing field between the attech sector the attech companies Publishers and all those uh providers of the education
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sector and the public sector and we do it through uh five main areas Technologies for ucation so we delivery the devices the virtual conferencing the
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repairs and the digital ramps the digital ramps are uh other devices that are deployed so that disabled kids can use the computers in the in their
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favor we also do educational platforms so it's software mainly word class platforms uh customized for for year why we do that customization we integrate it with our learning management system we
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provide single sign on uh ecosystem where the kids can have all their platforms and all the information is uh protected there and at the same time is available for all the policy makers and
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decision makers at the education uh sector we provide programs the ones that I told you like say Valen which is a video conferencing program through which
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a remote teacher pairs with a in class in the classroom teacher and they delivered the the class together and we run randomized control trials and we get we are getting the same effect from a
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face to-face lesson with this combination of remote teacher uh pairing with uh a face-to-face teacher and that made us um that made the possibility uh
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a reality of having English in every single School in the country and um computational thinking for every single uh kid in the country we also have educational programs innovation in terms
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of um pedagogy teachers professional development and an area that is directed uh to strategic information so there we have the user experience unit and the
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behavioral um um behavioral insights unit with the data architecture unit collaborating to see uh the kind of experiments that we can run to make to
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achieve better and better uh goals so I told you about accessibility we may be able or any country might be able to deliver devices for every single kid but then we realize
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that every kid or disabled kids for example cannot leverage those uh devices in their favor so we need an extra layer I have a video there but I think that
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I'll share it afterwards in the matter of of the time the the professional development initiative runs um opsource uh massive online courses um
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platform that is free and public for every single school teacher so there we we have massive trainings for all of our teachers and at the same time we have face-to-face training trying to bring
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all these disruptive Technologies uh to to the classroom um we have a user experience area we have no and learned that you can provide Technologies for the students
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yes you can provide software you can provide platforms but if you're not taking into consideration the quality of the experience the student is getting from using those technological tools
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then there is there is another Equity issue some students will benefit much more from that than others and normally are those students who already are
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better in their metacognitive skills uh data and Behavioral Science so we have two main goals with that uh provide data analysis that is user
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centered to inform decision making at the classroom level at the school level and at the policy level and to evaluate programs and implementation of Education policies that we uh deploy so that's uh
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the the main goal of our data and Behavioral Science unit we also noticed that uh uh we have we were lacking in terms of the knowledge of cognitive science in education so how we learn
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matters and if our teachers don't know the latest research on how to teach and how we learn or actually because of what we know about how we learn how we should
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be transform our teaching then there is also an equity issue so we deployed a cognitive science um in initiative to train all of our teachers uh like 100%
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of our teachers in the country on their latest research on cognitive science we have a foundation seal Foundation is the the the arm of seal that uh bonds with the Academia so we
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run grants uh and we collaborate with a number of Partners Stan is is one of them for example where we run uh experiments randomized control trials in
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every single uh new platform and solution that we offer and that is important because there is not that many that much research out there on what
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kind of Technologies really help in the education systems um I'll skip that uh video because I think yeah I'll still have some minutes
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but uh we'll come back to it later um what we need to address that's a complex matter um we need to address many challenges at the same time I was
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telling you the access to devices the internet connectivity the access to platforms the access to attech products the ACC the access to new kinds of um let's say media platforms we make a lot
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of training and fake news and how to be um a good audience in in in this age but right now we have another issue um artificial intelligence is going to
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be mainstream edication very soon is already being used in so in so many many uh Solutions then if we are not careful and if we we are not intentional about
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uh bringing this technology to our system another digital divide may be created so what we do is operate on the let's say certainty that technology is
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not the answer to all education problems but it is impossible to imagine a future without technology in education so this brings us the question if this is a reality we need in every place around
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the world I wouldn't say a saal because it will be different in every single uh country but a saal like organization that is uh taking care of how these
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Technologies are affecting the future of of our kids how these Technologies are being implemented in the classroom so that Innovation that may maybe not at
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the edge as Philipe was uh presenting uh is um absolutely well distributed uh part of the aim of our our public education systems is making sure that
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the future is equitably distributed in every single School community in the country so how are we going to accomplish that if the talent in it is so scarce if our teachers don't know how
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to leverage these Technologies uh in the classroom so that our their students can take advantage of this Technologies in their life projects to have happy lives
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in the future um and and that um we uh we have several lines we use Behavioral Sciences uh to
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see how our students are responding to the um deployments that we make so Behavioral Science are a convergence of Economics psychology sociology that
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student uh study human behavior and the purpose is an evidence-based approach to human behavior in some aspects so what we are using is using behavioral
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perspective uh to to work how on how people make decisions in their day-to-day lives in in education how people react depending on how options are presented and what factors influence
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human behavior so it help us in in understanding the how and why we design or redesign our policies and our initiatives and I'm going to provide
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some examples uh afterwards um so so why Behavioral Sciences in education well um education is um a a complex room complex and
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multicausal problems require diverse approaches so the behavioral Dimension cannot be left out when facing challenges in education uh because it's simple and cost effective in some
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interventions and it concentrates uh some um economic efforts on structural bar barriers um so how we approach education Innovation
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and say well so we find a Target we explore all the solutions out there we find a solution we make a trial and then we scale it up we never try try
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something at seal that we are not sure we never Implement something at seal that we are not sure that it can scale nationally and that's a totally different approach from other uh school
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systems where they are buying and finding Solutions at a school level like every school has a different solution um but at the same time this is a great
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let's say um environment for um attech companies that are out there offering solutions to problems that nobody has um
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and and end up being in the ecosystem of a school so having an organization that can funnel all this offering understand it make it cohes coherent with the
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educational system it's a great advantage in terms of equity at a national level um so here we have the example of the video conference as a as a learning
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tool um so through the video conferencing system that is is present in every single School uh in the classroom we were available to be to bring scarse Talent to every single
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School in the in in Uruguay 60% of the lessons that are uh the English lessons that are taught in U are taught by foreigners because we don't have enough
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uh teachers of English yes we're trying to train them faster but at some point uh it's going to be a problem everywhere I already I I just came from Germany they're having a great problem with that
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in the US it's a problem I am sure that here is a problem too another area where we found uh that Equity is has become important is the in educational content
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so we uh after the pandemic we notice that when the pandemic hit um teenagers were not very engaged with the offerings that we could make a available we
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started trying with TV shows and radio shows but uh guess what teenagers couldn't care less about TV and radio and all those means so we tried uh with
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social media like in YouTube and Instagram trying to put some lessons there with influencers with different kind of characters and we we were more
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successful than before with the TV and the radio but still not successful enough but we discovered that horror stories are still a thing for uh
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teenagers and uh we worked with an author we asked uh her to write a mystery story and all of our teenagers like all the cohort of students around
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14 years old engage with this content and learn through this content during the school closure that is true it was the shortest School closure in whole Latin America because we have the
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information and we could reopen our system very very fast but still we discovered that there are new types of Education content that uh bring
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different results like these uh horror stories that uh we deployed for learning so in terms of very concrete examples of things that have worked for
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us uh so we have these tests standardized tests different types of tests and the response rate was very low so how we could encourage students to
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take tests uh one of the ways was trying to overcome emotional barriers if you had um if you watch the video at the beginning with some attention there was a program that was called youth to
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program Hoven is a programar it was um a coding boot camp that was provided for students uh 18 years old and Beyond and we found out that women in general were
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more reluctant uh to finish this program and we needed uh reasons why so through um um on WhatsApp messaging tool we
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increased the attendance of uh applicants and we generated some kind of confident confidence boost yes it didn't work for all of them but for or the the
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middle uh of the let's say gaus uh graph it was very very important the same thing happened with uh test performance in terms of uh stem
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we we just by providing uh relaxation and breathing exercises to all the cohort that started uh um the youth to
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program um cohort we in increase the finishing um let's say um rate rate the gender gap was reduced by 80% women
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women uh pass rate increased by 10% just by providing this uh small space to be um let's say conscious of the feelings that you were having at the beginning of
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the program um so and now what for seal and and for us so working in digital transformation for Education it looks like a Perpetual
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marathon it's not a Sprint it's not something that we are going to fix education is not something that you fix it's not a technical problem it's more similar in my opinion to democracy it's
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something you nurture you improve you work uh you keep uh Reinventing uh bringing more public policies uh inspired in the scientific method build Bridges between scientific
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knowledge and teaching practice and and move from paper and ideas to to classroom and train the trainers whatever we want to happen in the classroom is is still in the teacher
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hands so the most important technology we have at the service of learning are still teachers and our teachers are the most important not only technology but factor and how they create techn ology
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for Education um is uh still very very relevant I will bring the presentation to an end now so that we can have some times for question I really thank you
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for your attention and um it's amazing and I really want to congratulate uh College of fans for uh having this kind of um conversations with people from
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very different disciplines because education uh needs the work work of all of us to keep improving so thank [Applause]
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[Music] you
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