Siva Pillai
Siva is the departmental ICT technician Computer Officer and is responsible for the Departmental computer equipment. He provides technical support for computer networks.
Since coming to the UK in 1968, Siva has been involved both in the teaching of his first language, Tamil and in developing the use of ICT within education. In 1982 he founded the TALA, based in Lewisham, and has played a major role in promoting the teaching of Tamil in the UK. From 1972 to 1989 he worked for ILLEC where he was involved in a number of initiatives including the creation of the Allwrite multilingual word processing programme.
Siva's main area of interest lies in the use of multimedia for language teaching. He has done pioneering work in showing how material can be created for languages with non-Roman scripts using both Hyperstudio and Powerpoint and has been invited to present his work in this area at national and international conferences. He has been commissioned by BECTA to create information sheet related to the use of ICT with community languages which are published on the BECTA website. He has also created animated bilingual (Tamil-English) e-books aimed at the primary age range. He is currently working with colleagues at London Guildhall University on an authoring programme to support open learning in Tamil.