Okay, so we're here to talk about the work of the University of Cambridge School Classics project. I'm the Latin learning specialist at the project and co-presenting with Ian Colvin who's worked at the project in development

for 15 years during which time most of our current digital resources were created. We're just going to talk through some of the resources that we have and their use and the future of these resources as well. I'm going to start with a brief history of where these resources came from then Ian's

going to demonstrate some of the resources in practice and then I'm going to talk about the future. This Cambridge School Classics project was conceived in 1966, we've been going a while, in response to a growing crisis in classics teaching. It was set

up under a joint initiative by the University of Cambridge Faculty of and the Department of Education in the UK. It's funded by the Schools Council and the Nuffield Foundation. Several crises had caused pupil numbers in the UK to dwindle at school level, primarily the removal of the Latin requirements for entry to these competitive universities and there was also increasing conversion of academically segregated schools

to a comprehensive system. There was also recognition that the subject had to engage with modern research and pedagogy in order to move forward and simply survive. Starting from first principles and taking full account of teaching methodology particularly in modern languages, the CSCP developed a Latin course radically different from all the previous

courses. The new Cambridge Latin course, CLC, integrated the study of language and the ancient world by developing people's reading skills through a set of stories set in the culture of the first century AD, starting in Pompeii and moving across the empire, ending in Rome.

The work of the project underpins a great many advances in the teaching of classics in the UK and the Cambridge Latin course is still used by more than 80% of schools teaching Latin in the UK. It's also used across the world, mainly in English-speaking countries. Initially the language map and the creation of it was influenced by the work of Chomsky and Halliday.

The course employed a generative grammar approach with the primary goal of learning to read Latin by reading Latin. The current course still follows the basic linguistic scheme that was laid out in the beginning, although there have been significant subsequent revisions to the content and layout of the textbooks and the supporting materials in light of teacher feedback and developments in pedagogy. It also was clear from early on that reading alone

was not enough to generate a useful passenger grammar as they described it, an internalised grammar system that the pupils could employ to read Latin. Structured opportunities to explore and retrieve language needed to be created in exercises and supplementary language information

needed to be disseminated to students, although care was taken at every stage to retain the principles of the comprehensible sentence as the core unit of Latin. And the core aim of the project still remains today to help make the classical world accessible to as many students as possible, in particular focus on forming strong links across the classic teaching community, advancing pedagogy through research and creating high quality resources, in particular currently

focusing on new technologies which we can use to get the message out. Our resources have got a long history with digital resources. In preparation for the fourth edition of the textbook in late 90s, Toni Smith and the CSUP team developed digital lexicography tools to analyse

the stories in the textbook and to track the impact of the changes they were making upon that intricate language scheme that had dated from the 60s and 70s. The fully parsed digital texts that were produced would form the backbone of all our subsequent resources.

In 1999, in response once more to an ongoing decline in Latin numbers, it seems to be cyclical, then project director Bob Lister developed the Cambridge Online Latin Project to enable students without a specialist Latin teacher to access Latin lessons. Schools were given support and training super advisory staff, often from the modern foreign languages departments,

and promoting lessons to the student body who then completed a programme of study online with a class tutor. A website was created to host the materials that those students were using and this is where the website really came into its own. Almost immediately adults were also making requests to have access to this material and an online distance learning programme was

rolled out. Funding was swiftly acquired to develop further digital materials including video dramatisations of the stories. The initial digital content was developed with the individual learner in mind as individualised preparation for those classroom interactions with the teacher or to consolidate the language that they've been learning in class. The first programmes

developed were vocabulary testers and a Latin endings programme to drill their inflectional endings. Also developed was a parsing dictionary to support the development of fluency reading. The next phase of digital resources saw the development of materials focusing more in this area of fluency of reading, assisting students in their reading and with more flexibility

over whether the tools could be used individually or as a whole class. Okay I'm now going to attempt to hand over to Ian who will briefly run through the current state of the digital provision across both the UK and the North American conditions. Fantastic so we'll turn

off your screen and I'll try and share mine. I hope I'm audible and I hope, is that showing now? Yep excellent, right thanks Lisa. So we've worked on as she says many many things over the past 30 years but it'll be best to show you a few of the key tools that support learners I think

in reading and learning Latin. So I'm going to start with our webbooks which are what you can see on your screen right now. These are online versions of the fourth edition course which can also be used, let me just move this out of the way so I can see what I'm doing,

they can also be used to launch some of our many digital resources and learning activities. So you'll see there's a story on the left page Cenato Adweinit, it's got a running vocabulary beside it, this is all very standard print stuff and on the right hand page there's some language points that are being practiced but on our web version of it here there's a

resources menu here which I can click on and click on the explore Cenato Adweinit activity to bring up this digital version of it. Now being web-based of course you can zoom into

this, make it larger, you can make it smaller but it's basically nicely laid out so that the reader can work his way through the story where they have problems with the word, they've forgotten what ready it means, they can click on it and down here at the bottom you'll see the

meaning is given and if they need it an analysis, a morphological analysis is given. Now we can, what this tool wants to be doing is making available as much help as is needed so we can turn off that morphological analysis and just have the meaning if we choose or for students who want

that morphological analysis we can switch it back on and the whole idea is fluency of reading. None of this, what I remember from my language learning and no doubt many of you will too, getting stuck on a word, flipping to the back of the book, looking up the word, having completely lost your fluency and you do it as you do it. So you forget Dormiantum, you click

on it, you know that it means sleep, you keep reading, you keep reading, you keep reading, you work your way to the end and perhaps you clicked on five, six, eight words, the computer remembers every word that you didn't know well enough to continue through or to guess the meaning of and you click on word check at the bottom left hand corner there and it will give you a list

of which words you need extra support in. You can study these, there's your meanings, there's what part of speech they are and at the end of it you can start a test. Typing in your answers, let's try return, yes it gives you other possible accepted answers

and you press the enter key to continue. Enough of that but you can see how useful that is, it's a tailored test for each individual student as he reads, tailored to the vocabulary he or she has difficulty with. Now another advantage of this reading tool is that it can support

people with other reading needs. So this view button will take us to a point here, so I'm going to just move my zoom out the way so I can see what I'm doing, here we go, drop it over there.

It takes us to a slightly different view, it allows people with reading needs, for example dyslexia, to click on, for example, changing the colours of the text. You will know that many students find this enormously useful to overcome dyslexia, different colours

and they can choose it themselves. Similarly students sometimes have motor needs or they're reading this, it's web-based so it could be read on a tablet, an iPad or even a tiny

phone screen, so you may want to use spacing to increase the distance between words so that it's easier to press on your screen on the correct word or change the breaks or increase the size of the words and I can take us back again like this. Now I wanted to show you a slightly

different version of this, a more recent version that we released for the American Fifth edition. You'll see it's the same tool but it's on a flatter screen, a flatter GUI, but what we have in addition to the float and the analysis which have moved down

and the word check which we've just shown you are these four tabs, listen, read, think and derive and we can hide them if we don't want them but we do want them, I want to show you what they do. The read tab is what we've just shown you, the same capabilities, but if I'm reading this and I want to provide a little bit more comprehension support, then we can click on the think tab

and think about each of the sentences as we go through them, we get this little extra set of numbers adding questions. I don't understand that sentence, well it asks me to think about

which word in that sentence shows that this wasn't the first time Kephalas had entered the bedroom. Let's try erosus, big tick and it's a game, he's had a conversation with Memor in the previous story, no reason why any of you should necessarily know that. The next sentence,

again I'm a bit confused, click the Latin word in line three which shows how Memor felt when he saw Kephalas. Well okay, say we don't know erosus is there, maybe it's simulac, you get a nice red cross, instant feedback, must be erosus, Memor was angry and it takes us through the

story with those little extra prompts that some students will need or want. Another tab here, the listen, I love very much because in addition to reading Latin, you may want to hear it and I hope that if I click here you will be able to hear my machine playing to you.

And I can stop it with a click and you will have noticed that as it reads the sentences are highlighted in red to help the student follow where they are in the text. The last tab to show

you is the derived tab which again is we're back to vocabulary and the study and and holding memory of remembering of vocabulary. You'll see some of these words are underlined with a little grey underline and these are words that we have additional details to help

students work out that stultus stulta, to remember that that means stupid, and the English the English derives derived from it of course is stultify, stultification, the Spanish is also there. No we, I don't know why we've only got the English there because we

could use all sorts of Italian and Spanish as well and so forth, you get the idea, ubiquitous, ubiquitous, ubiquitous. It reminds students how useful, it helps them remember the

vocabulary, it reminds them how useful Latin is of course for modern languages as well. Now let me show you some things other than our our reading tool. So if I take us back to the web book I can take us on two pages to the practicing the language pages and up in

the resources tab we find a number of activities related to practicing the the language points that this stage is concentrating on or to revising points that have been taught in earlier stages. So let's try the sorting words, the which case

sorting words. I'll bring that up there. You see this is a very simple and and in some ways an old-fashioned test. You'd have a bunch of words and you sort them into three different columns according to in this case the cases. We can drop damn in there. Now let's get a few

wrong as well as we work through them. Architectum, maybe domino lives in there, who knows. Prinkeps, it says I've got eight words correct. Bene, but actually there's something wrong so we need another go. Domino is clearly not the accusative singular. What happens if we drop

it in there? Excellent. Optinae, next question. And there's a series of these questions practicing different things. Now I'm rushing because I don't want to stop Lisa talking. There's one other one I'd like to show you and we go back to Cambridge Ladder Book. We could go to the practicing the language three. I'll bring that up here. This is a close of course, very

familiar to us all, a fill the gap activity. We've got two little lives here. If we get it wrong twice then it'll tell us what the correct answer is. So if to ipse hank rema administrare I mistakenly choose debeo, you see the dolphin hops off the page. Maybe it's debet, oh dear,

I've got the wrong form of the verb and it tells us where to look in the textbook to understand what we were doing wrong and then it gives us the correct form, debes, and asks us to the translation. So I could get this wrong as well perhaps. I myself must take care of this thing

and we hit go. Oh rats, should be you yourself of course, silly me. I must look after this thing, perhaps that's a better translation. One of the things though if you're confused as a learner

that this allows you to do is to check debes. That relates to the English you and must. It underlines the words that we want to check, look after, that is administrare. These are linked words and it's a way of helping students relate. Now we have so many of

these activities I could be showing you but I need to give Lisa time to talk. I've shown you an enormous DVD and e-learning resource that organizes a thousand different activities into six different readily usable courses with lesson plans etc, complete with videos, dramatizations

of the stories, and integrated cultural background videos and activities. Separately from the language learning we have resources for introducing classics into primary

schools and middle schools. There's one called the Primary Ancient Greeks which uses storytelling in translation to hook students into classics. The primary, the middle school is the one area where in Britain we still have classics in the curriculum and every English student is still obliged to learn a little bit about the Greeks and the Romans.

That is a very fast overview. Lisa let me hand back to you. I need to turn off my sharing. Thank you Ian. I'm just going to take us through a brief overview of how these resources are

used in the classroom in the UK and also what we think the future of these resources could be, hopefully will be under us. So many of the resources that Ian has shown you

are accessed individually or homework tasks in the classroom at the moment. They are used in the classroom via tablet or mobile device largely. There are still a good number of schools in the UK where the teacher has to book a computer suite in order for their students to access digital resources. This is changing but at the moment it does tend to be those Latin

lessons taking place in wealthier technology driven schools are making most use of these resources. As I said these things are changing and also the schools that are making use of these resources are using them in pretty much every lesson. It's a fundamental part of their lesson and their lesson planning. The activities support the inductive methods of the course and

they enable the students to rehearse their pattern forming. The sorting words activities we saw can be particularly well deployed to bridge the gap between the contextual translation of a form in a story and the formal explanation that comes in the Cambridge Latin course method later. So a good deployment of sorting words can bridge that gap for students

and help them to consolidate what the pattern is. The activities that are self-marking have been arranged across the stages in such a way that they structure consolidation and retrieval. They're not just arranged around the current language point that is being discussed in that

chapter. They consolidate on a fairly intricate timetable features that have been met but not rehearsed in the storyline. This is throughout all this low risk low stakes learning the activities can be repeated with that instant feedback and it's part of the tailoring of the support

we do to individual needs and although that is an area we are looking at to improve upon even further. Students are particularly motivated to attempt tasks more than once and as you can see from the quotes from some of our 13 year old users and they have been observed as wanting to improve their Latin rather than simply finish tasks. The design of the activities encourages

the touch screen use and the physical engagement with the Latin text. It also has the added benefit that it's one way in which teachers can observe how their students are learning and how they're translating especially in younger students who may not be able to

express verbally what the processes are that they're employing in their translation. The low risk side of these activities, the fact that the teacher is not assessing them constantly can promote a shift away from the classroom and focus on performance. For example, administering everybody's favorite vocabulary test formally encourages students to use strategies which

help them to perform under the test conditions, cramming words frantically into short term memory in the corridor just before class. This low stakes instant feedback driven activity encourages the learning that's meaningful, it goes into long term memory, it's repetitive

and the combination in particular of the explore of the story, the critical texts that you've demonstrated with that brief vocabulary revision and test afterwards ensure that that vocabulary assessment is rooted in the intended outcome, the increased fluency of Latin reading, the vocabulary is linked to when they met it and how they used it. By removing some of the performance

elements of that traditional classroom, including that need to impress the teacher, these interactive resources can support positive learning habits, risk taking, creativity. If the students are not constantly looking words up in the back of the book in the dictionary, they can concentrate on the comprehension of the Latin and also the nuances of selecting appropriate words to express

what the text actually means. The materials are engaging but they encourage students to read for themselves, work out meanings for themselves. The materials are also used in a whole class situation, commonly playing the videos whole class or projecting onto an interactive whiteboard.

This often allows a showcase for some of the best ways in which technology can support dialogic teaching and learning and the materials being explored together collaboratively, the teacher guiding the discussion and focus and this dialogue can be transformed further into

independent and collaborative learning using for example the cultural links and the other resources that are on the website to research and read around the narrative of the textbook. Students can feed into each other's understanding of the text and they can learn together on those areas. It's an area where there is room for development and that brings me on to the final part

of this which is the future for these materials. As always, Latin is suffering external threats in the UK. Constraints on teaching hours and increasingly grammar translation focused assessment methods and numerous accountability measures.

They threaten to shift our classroom focus from genuine language acquisition towards exam coaching. Written translation dominates the UK exams with the re-emergence of prose composition into Latin. It's a grammar translation exercise that is far removed from genuine communicative writing and the reproduction of translations of set text at the expense of

writing about the meaning of the set text. Even as class contact time shrinks the syllabus seems to expand. In our high stakes system the examination priorities determine classroom activity. We receive requests from teachers on tight time cables for more grammar translation real activities for the materials we produce to be more closely aligned to exam board

assessment criteria. They feel they've been forced to train their students to pass the exam rather than to teach them laughing. So our aim going forward is to develop resources which support teachers in preparing their students for these assessments but also enable them to teach well which is what they want. Our new online platform is in the very initial stages of

development which is why I can't show you but I hope will be a wonderful platform and it's not there yet. This platform will differ substantially from the previous versions as it will be the first one to be developed in tandem with a new edition of the textbook which is currently being developed just now. This gives us the opportunity to move our thinking from digital resources which

support an existing course to digital resources as one component in an integrated course. Teachers will be able to log into an increasingly sophisticated digital suite of resources based around the ones that you have seen and to create an online classroom for their students assigning logins to pupils in their classes. All our digital resources can be spread over

different media and accessed in different ways. You mentioned not only the web based resources but also the DVD and there are other multiple other resources that have been created over the years and they're all moving to a browser-based delivery. The worksheets, teacher guides and the other print-based resources are being digitised. We already have a digital text but we will be

retaining the print textbook as well. Teachers will be able to organise these materials and develop their lesson plans within their classroom account which we hope will aid the integration of multimodal teaching. We don't want them just to be using the technology but it will enable them to integrate it more effectively into the other teaching and learning

experience in the room. Digital resources will therefore not be seen in isolation. The Latin will be used alongside the archaeology, the videos and all these other resources. Those individual accounts and logins will enable teachers to create a digital lesson which their students access and at first this is going to be a simple curation of the existing materials

that teachers will be able to do themselves but we are currently considering how to enable collaborative working. For example ask the teacher and also ask the classroom so that students can actually work together on these materials. The skilled teacher plays such a

crucial role in directing the learning and supporting individuals and I think that our digital resources can support them in this. We're implementing progress tracking with individual vocabulary and activity feedback to encourage students to focus on their individual progress. However we're also carefully considering the potential impact of this. As mentioned that low risk environment that has been developed through these resources encourages risk taking

and we do not want to lose that as the teacher is able to access their students information. We don't want to create a perpetual atmosphere of assessment. We are investigating ways of turning on and off feedback and tracking and promoting specific test materials and

signposting breakthrough the other materials are not for testing. As we create this new textbook we're simultaneously creating the next generation of digital resources to provide support and extension in a very mixed ability settings that we have in our classroom and opportunities for wider reading and that collaboration. This includes additional

consolidation activities, additional stories involving the characters from the books so students can continue to read and cultural investigation based on the materials that the students are studying. We aim to exploit the potential of agile development. We can respond to students and teachers needs for more exam directed materials but in an ever-changing

system that should not be our priority but in an agile system we can provide for that as well. We can roll out our resources in response to the changing needs and also the evolving pedagogy and research into the ancient world. As you can see we are planning to be extremely busy

for the foreseeable future. So thank you very much for listening to us at the very end of all of this and yes please don't hesitate to contact us. Thank you for your time.