Jeddah: Effat College concluded its annual symposium "Learning & Technology" on Sunday after two days of lectures and workshops. The conference dealt with the importance of digital literacy and ways of using technology.
The symposium opened at the Jeddah Hilton Hotel on Saturday evening with a speech of welcome by Haifa Jamalallail, dean of Effat College.
She welcomed Prince Faisal ibn Saud ibn Abdul Mohsen and Princess Loulowah Al-Faisal, vice chairman of the Board of Trustees and general supervisor of Effat College.
In her speech Jamalallail stressed applying technology to our daily lives and using the appropriate methods to make use of it.
"We must possess the ability to learn and understand technology and its use in the appropriate manner, because the challenge that developing countries must overcome is not a lack or an abundance of technology but the inappropriate use of it," she said.
Speakers in the session entitled "Digital Literacy -- No Boundaries, No Limits" stressed the importance of employing computers and digital technology in general in school classrooms.
Princess Loulowah thanked Effat College for the symposium. She said that it was a landmark, saying, "Digital literacy has become an important factor in our daily lives, no less than reading and writing. It has become a basic prerequisite in working environments that deal with competition in the contemporary world."
A lecture that attracted great interest was "Learning and the Brain," given by German professor Dr. Manfred Spitzer, head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Ulm in Germany. He spoke about language and how the brain processes it.
Workshops on the second day took place at Effat College using the computer labs to make the learning more practical and applicable.
Mohammed Khaldoun Dia, ICT coordinator of Dar Al-Fikr Schools in Jeddah, presented a workshop about educational digital videos.
He spoke on the integration of digital video into teaching and learning and its potential to enhance learning across the curriculum.
Others spoke about e-tutorials and teaching Microsoft productivity tools in Arabic.
By Lulwa Shalhoub
© Arab News 2007
