Last quarter, professors of the Masters in Psychiatry at the London King’s College have recorded a large number of classes using Speechi, on an experimental basis.

More than 60 courses were recorded; these courses were routinely made available to the 43 students at the end of the class.

Following this experience, a survey was conducted among all students. I deliver to you the main results.

1. Massive consultation and adoption of Speechi by the students
Speechi was massively used by the majority of students. 60% of them followed more than 20 courses online (of which 20% followed more than 50 courses!). 3 students out of 4 use Speechi to view or review more than half of the course, which means that Speechi is used for long review sessions.

2.  Speechi is a complement to lecture hall training, but does not replace it.
Only 4% of the students systematically replaced lecture hall sessions with Speechi. The others used it to review some points, take notes …etc

3. 100% of the students think Speechi is useful, very useful, extremely useful or even “absolutely necessary” (but how did they do before!). These results go beyond expectations.

4. Speechi allows the student to focus on the understanding of the course.
According to me, the most interesting consequence, to my opinion, is that students coment that Speechi allows them to focus on the understanding of the course, rather than on pure note taking (and yes, as I metionned in a previous post, it is difficult to do both tasks at the same time, especially when the subject is rather complex).

Students know that they can complete their notes later and they focus on understanding.

5. Speechi allows better documentation
Other interesting consequences. Since the students review a great part of the course at their homes, they have internet available and this tremendously helps them for documentation, and studying further misunderstood passages..etc

Prof. John Livesey, helped by Sandrine Thuret, obtained these results, which are to my opinion outstanding.

I thank them warmly for their work. Here are the complete results of the survey as well as students comments .

[Translated from Un retour d’expérience très positif suite à l’utilisation massive de Speechi au King’s College.. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

[Translated from Des “TICE” vues comme symptôme de la perte du capital scolaire. Please note that due to lack of time, I don't translate my posts myself and usually do not review translations, so they may not be fully accurate and/or present some imperfections. Thierry]

“School Capital” is a term originally used by Bourdieu and has NOTHING to do with the economical sense of the word “capital”.

“School capital” rather means “quality of education” or “school quality”, this term taking into consideration the quality of teaching, and the quality and level of students.

So in fact, “Loss of school capital” is just a little pompous way to talk about the decline of the overall educational level.

I use these terms because they are Bourdieu’s, who inspired my thoughts for this ticket (if I wasn’t that modest, I would tell you I had precursors, but in fact, I just need to have more credible references than myself).

Information technologies are presented to us as the future, the panacea, the symbol of tomorrow’s education. Technologies that will create jobs, awaken our children and so on (I stop here, as other clichés fail me).

But to some extent, they are just symptoms of the deterioration of the quality of education.

It’s a situation that I quite frequently encounter. Some examples:

1. Eric Delcroix writes on his blog why he refused to let his daughter register to a special IT centric classroom. To summarize in one line: he saw brand new equipement with NOTHING behind. No suport, no followup, no competency, no IT insight. At the end, all that costly equipment (costly in capital, but failing to provide any school capital) was there only to hide the huge vacuity of the educational project.
2. The budgets of the french National Education are being sized down and the number of teachers decreases. But at the same time, all IT investments (language labs, IT resources, Interactive whiteboards…) are being showed off. This “show-off effort” indeed hides the average decline of our school capital.
3. French politicians (Mayors, Senators, President of general or regional councils and even ministers) now inaugurate interactive whiteboards ! I found a dozen newspaper articles on this subject in the last weeks. Unsurprisingly, the speech they deliver is always the same (finally a left/right consensus!). They speak about the future of the nation where IT are keys, of the reduction of the digital fracture (does it only exist ?). Again, nothing new – and even sometimes just nothing at all – under the sun. Agin, all this just masks a complete absence of real projects and vision.
4. The country where education has been the most disorganized in the last 10 years, the UnitedKingdom, is almost 100% equipped with interactive whiteboards (more than 400,000 IWB in schools, less than 15,000 in France). (Not to mention that that some people in France want to copy this !). The real reason is that Tony Blair’s reforms created intense competitions between UK schools so schools must display “visble signs” of school capital rather than really possess any. Again, a symptom.

Bourdieau always, in “La noblesse d’état”:

The logic that drives the schools that lack school capital the most[...] finds a counterweight that requires an effort in accumulating educational capital, event at the price of an ostentatious exhibition of the exterior signs of pedagogical avant-gardism: for example by deploying treasures of modernist inventions, both in terms of equipment, language laboratories, computer resources, audiovisual equipment… and in terms of pedagogical techniques, that are always presented as more active, more modern, more international.

Keep in mind that my post is written by someone who strongly believes that Information Technologies can help and be useful – as long as they have a meaning.

Version 3.5.0.9 lets yous automatically manage all Speechi licences, including Speechi Light free licence.

After installing Speechi, open PowerPoint and select the licence manager in the speechi menu.

Click on the “Get your free licence” button.

Enter your email as a “New user”, then finish completing the registration form.

Your Speechi Light code is immediately emailed to you.

When you receive it, enter Licence Manager again, click on “Get your free licence” button, paste it at the bottom of the form and click on “Register licence”.

Congratulations to Pr Delmotte, from French Medical Sport Society, who developped 4 Speechis using new video/PowerPoint synchronisation features during summertime. Those Speechis are based from conferences that were recorded live. They use :

• smart one-click post-sync.
• new custom sizing of left colum video by the author

The 4 Speechis can be freely accessed from the Society’s site. (just click on the red square).

Conference in Rennes

Conference in Grenoble

Conference in Toulouse

Conference in Paris