Communication and Information Technology (ICT) offers us teachers new ways to communicate, interact and teach our students. It helps us improve our classes, our knowledge, our lives. It provides us tools, techniques and instruments for the development of our classes and materials for our classes.
With technology our students have a wide range of opportunities to learn and practice English in real time and with people outside the classroom and the institution, people from all over the world. That leads them to an authentic learning experience.
Technology gives our students the opportunity to create, innovate, share and construct meanings, information and knowledge in a very interactive way, that will motivate them and will develop their autonomy, they will have control in their learning process.
The main task for us teachers is to guide them in order to teach them how to use technology in a safety and critical way. To teach them how to differ right and wrong, safe and dangerous, true and false information.
The first thing we teachers have to do is analyze our context. I work in a school with elementary students and I also work at the UCV. In the school there are many web tools that can be used in order to motivate children and to help them practice with technology (that they use everyday and that they handle almost perfectly), but it is very difficult to accomplish this because we do not have the resources at the school, neither the time. In my second context it is a completely different situation. At the UCV we do not have the resources either, but we have the opportunity to assign some projects that may involve technology, such as wikis and blogs. One of the projects I've been thinking about is an e-portfolio in literature, in which students have to translate some Aesop fables into Spanish for children.
With technology our students have a wide range of opportunities to learn and practice English in real time and with people outside the classroom and the institution, people from all over the world. That leads them to an authentic learning experience.
Technology gives our students the opportunity to create, innovate, share and construct meanings, information and knowledge in a very interactive way, that will motivate them and will develop their autonomy, they will have control in their learning process.
The main task for us teachers is to guide them in order to teach them how to use technology in a safety and critical way. To teach them how to differ right and wrong, safe and dangerous, true and false information.
The first thing we teachers have to do is analyze our context. I work in a school with elementary students and I also work at the UCV. In the school there are many web tools that can be used in order to motivate children and to help them practice with technology (that they use everyday and that they handle almost perfectly), but it is very difficult to accomplish this because we do not have the resources at the school, neither the time. In my second context it is a completely different situation. At the UCV we do not have the resources either, but we have the opportunity to assign some projects that may involve technology, such as wikis and blogs. One of the projects I've been thinking about is an e-portfolio in literature, in which students have to translate some Aesop fables into Spanish for children.
We teachers have a lot of work to do, technology is developing every day and we can not be behind it. So, let's start!!
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