If You Can’t Beat Them…

      Last year, we had the opportunity to attend a conference delivered by Nicky Hockly at the UNL ATE Hotel in Santa Fe city, Argentina. The aim of this event was to present Hockly’s latest book titled “Going Mobile”, a book that offers different strategies to incorporate technology in the EFL classroom, a matter that is often discussed by teachers everywhere.

     “Going Mobile” encourages us to consider technology as our friend and ally in the teaching task, and not as the unwanted intruder that we sometimes believe it is. Now, the question that all teachers have in mind is: How can I incorporate technology in my classroom in a positive productive way?

As a possible answer to that question, Hockly suggests the use of applications such as “Aurasma” (a web 2.0 tool) which create the opportunity to use the cellphone in class to complete specific tasks and at the same time achieve different learning goals in the process, in a motivating way. This application is only one of the many present in Hockly’s book, in which she opens a world of possibilities to bring technology to the classroom in a prolific way.

The only thing left is to be willing to give technology a chance.

Face-to-Face or Online Teaching? BOTH!

    As we all know, technology is part of our everyday lives as we are constantly manipulating it in almost everything we do, and education is not the exception. Digital methods are becoming a popular resource in nowadays classrooms but, are these current methods better than traditional ones?  In fact, both types of teaching methods have positive and unique benefits so why don’t mix the best of each of them?  The combination of them is called “Blended Learning”, that is to say, a mix of face-to-face learning and online instruction.

  Imagine providing students with opportunities to learn through a tool that they consider an essential part of their lives. This might mean that a simple task can become extremely motivating for them if we, for example, give them the chance to post it and comment on it on a digital platform. In that way, students will not only make contact with tasks and activities outside the classroom, but also feel attracted to do it because it will imply using their technological devices. What’s more, they will be able to share their work and, at the same time, have access to their classmates’ ideas. Besides, through this kind of activities, teachers can become aware of possible difficulties students might have and therefore, plan a new lesson accordingly.

     If you want that Blended Learning works efficiently, it is important to consider your (and your students) personal context and to think of where/when in your classroom would be a good idea to use one method or the other.  Face-to-face teaching give us the chance to make of the learning process of our students something personal and valuable. When it comes to answer and help each student individually, the teacher is a key resource . A digital platform won’t be able to guide or adress the learners' doubts as well as to give them  confidence to enjoy their learning experience. 

     We can’t say that one method works better than another, but we do know that by mixing them, you can make profit of both. Despite the fact that with the rise of internet and technology students have huge amounts of information at their disposal, we need to teach them how to manipulate that information and how they can trust what they read on web-sites. By becoming familiar with technology and internet, we will help our students to handle these significant and vital tools in the best possible way.

The Future is here: Web 2.0

     Web 2.0 represents a new way of creating, sharing, storing, distributing and manipulating digital information.

      The barriers between people and the Internet have never been so thin: people can not only access to a huge amount of information, but also can manipulate it, create it, and share it massively. We (teachers) should see this as an incredible opportunity to be creative/innovators in the classroom. We can find a lot of tools in the net that could help us to teach English in a more motivating and engaging way than ever, and guess what? Most of those tools are free! Now, let us show you some interesting ideas to implement these amazing tools in your teaching.

When teaching a foreign language, asking your students to write a story is always a great option to make them use the language in a creative and meaningful way. Storybird is a free site where you can design books page by page. 

It allows you to add text and images to transform your books into colorful and vibrant productions. This tool is interesting and useful, as it gives the students the chance to personalize their works in a fun and interactive way while they’re learning to write in another language. Once your students finish their stories, they can share it online with hundreds of people around the world, isn’t it amazing? This site is completely safe, and also, you can move through it easily as the information is clear and neat and it doesn’t contain spam. 

Another interesting tool is Popplet. Sometimes students don’t take notes when we teach them new vocabulary, and then, when they need to use it, they just don’t have it. A good way of having vocabulary organized in a simple and attractive way is by the making of mind maps. This site is completely free, and you can start creating mind maps as soon as you access to it. 

You can ask your students to create a mind map using all the vocabulary that they have learnt during a lesson, or maybe, if they have computers in the classroom, they can write the words as you write them on the blackboard. In that way, the students can have different mind maps for each topic that you deal with, and whenever they need to use that vocabulary they can use their mind maps. A good option would be to print the mind maps and ask your students to collect them in a folio in their note books. This tool also allows students to be creative and personalise everything they do: they can use different colours, as many boxes as they wish, and images. You can also download it as a PDF file, which makes it much more easy to take it everywhere you need  and then print it.

These are just two of many tools that you can find on the Internet. Here you can take a look at others: Teachers' Favored Web 2.0 Tools. If you want to get more information about what Web 2.0 is, you can visit this site: Web 2.0. 

Be Innovative Without Going Crazy

        Sometimes teachers believe that being innovative in the classroom involves a lot of materials’ preparation and it is extremely time consuming. This might be true on some occasions, but there are ways to include elements to make it more appealing for the students without having to spend a lot of time on it. 

      Recently, we found ourselves in the task of making a short didactic sequence in which technology should be present. We planned it for a 4^th year of secondary school in which we were supposed to teach Past Simple.  Taking into consideration that in the majority of Argentina’s schools it’s quite difficult to have an Internet connection, we decided to make an activity that doesn’t require it. In our country, the majority of students have netbooks provided by the government, which is an excellent resource not to be left aside. So we thought of an activity that could include the netbooks without necessarily requiring internet connection in the classroom.  Our proposal then, was to introduce the Past Simple tense to the students and giving them the task of thinking (and later writing) about a fictitious holiday of a celebrity. We introduced this project showing the students a short video describing the last holiday of Lady Gaga. The video shows some images and a short text in Past Simple under each picture. At this point, the most important thing is to keep the celebrity’s identity in secret, so students will guess who the celebrity is by reading the subtitles and watching the images. You can take a look at our video below!

       This video shows exactly what we want students to make later and also, we used it for showing them some specific points as regards grammar and vocabulary. The making of this video only took us 15 minutes, not more than that, and it helped us both: to introduce the topic and the final task and to guide students how to produce their own videos.
      Taking into account the T- PACK reflections, we decided to make the video using Windows Movie Maker. We selected this video editor because it has all the tools we needed, it fits perfectly with the final task and it is very simple to use. Besides, most of students have it and it doesn’t require an Internet connection.

During this lesson, students worked in groups and then shared their videos to the rest of their classmates who had to guess who the celebrities in each video were.

In terms of SAMR, by replacing the traditional use of pen and paper with the new technology, we are gaining the opportunity to introduce innovative strategies in the classroom, and at the same time we are encouraging students to learn and to participate in their own learning in a different way. As you can see, just with a short video we are providing the students with the opportunity of being creative, learn in a more motivating and entertaining way and also playing a guessing game. It’s not necessary to spend a lot of time to be innovative and allow students to be engaged as well.

Here you’ll find information about Windows Movie Maker and also you’ll be able to download it: http://windows.microsoft.com/es-ar/windows-live/movie-maker

Designing Teaching Materials: Pros and Cons.

  If you are not sure about designing your own teaching materials, kwowing the advantages and disadvantages of it might help you to make up your mind.

    Why is it that teachers all over the world choose to construct their own teaching materials despite the wide variety of commercially produced ones? Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major talk about it in their work “Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials”. They emphasize the fact that there are some advantages and disadvantages when it comes to material designing that should be taken into account by teachers.

Advantages

      According to Howard and Major, one of the main reasons why teachers may consider to produce teaching materials is “contextualisation”. When reading a coursebook it is quite clear for teachers that there are certain activities or topics that just don't “fit” with the real context of a particular group of students. This happens because most of the commercial teaching products are designed for the world-wide EFL market. For instance, if you are teaching in an impoverished context your students may find it useless or even discouraging to learn vocabulary about “holidays”. So, by producing their own materials, teachers can take into account all the particularities of a specific group of students (their contexts, cultural backgrounds, previous knowledge, available resources, etc.) Another advantage of designing teaching materials is that allows teachers to consider “individual needs”. As a teacher, you should acknowledge the differences among students within the same group and adapting or creating teaching materials considering the learners' first languages and cultures, their learning needs and their previous experience. “Personalisation” is another advantage of teacher-designed materials. When teachers make their own material, they are adding a personal touch that students usually appreciate. Finally, “timeline” is another characteristic that encourages teachers to start producing their own materials, as allow them to respond to local and international events with up-to-date, relevant and high interest topics and tasks.

Disadvantages

    Now we will focus on the disadvantages of materials designed by teachers that Howard and Major mention as the most relevant ones. The first one is “organization”. Teachers that design their own teaching materials sometimes find it difficult to make a clear progression on their lessons. This could cause frustration in the learners who will not be able to see the development of their English. That's why coursebooks, which are usually well-organised and follow certain principles and patterns, offer both: teachers and learnes security and a sense of “knowing what they are doing and what follows”. The second, and according to the writers the most common criticism against teacher-made materials, is “quality”. Teachers who lack of experience and understanding may produce materials which contain errors, poorly constructed and that lack of durability. The third disadvantage emphasized is “time”. For many teachers it is not possible to find the time to actually make their own materials, even if they believe that is the best option. This reason may inhibit teachers from producing their own teaching materials.

     As we have seen, there are many factors to take into account when thinking about whether or not to design our own teaching material. The authors give some advice to make this in the best possible way, such as adapt and modify materials to supplement a coursebook rather than starting from scratch. Of course that teachers will become better material designers only with a lot of practice and experience in the matter. The only way is trying, so be as creative as you can and you will succeed. 

To find more information about how to be a good teaching material designer go ahead and take a look to the complete text by Howard and Major where you will find a guidelines for designing efective English Teaching Materials and factors to consider when designing materials .

To trust or not to trust: Websites

         How many times have you asked yourself whether a website is trustworthy or not? Nowadays, internet has become the main source of information for everyone, but we need to be careful about which websites we choose to trust. As teachers, we are looking for new information and innovative activities all the time, so it is extremely important that all the material that we take from the internet is reliable enough to present it in front of the classroom.

      Susan Beck talks about some Evaluation Criteria to select useful and trustworthy web sources. For instance, she mentions “Authority” as one aspect to pay attention to: Is there an author? Is the page signed? Is the author qualified? An expert? Those are some of the questions that you should ask yourself when visiting a website in order to have a clue of its reliability. Many websites offer a lot of valuable information, but when we want to contact the authors or look for their qualifications there is no data available.

          On the other hand, there are pages that give you that kind of information, a case in point is BBC Learning English. At the bottom of the page you can find the option: “About BBC Learning English” and if you click on this, you can find information about the contributors and the authors. In fact, you will find each of the author’s profiles, so as to get to know each of them and also contact them via mail in the option “Contact BBC LearningEnglish”.

       Another aspect to take into account according to Beck is “Currency”, which has to do with how updated the webpage is. You should check if the site is dated and also if the links that are provided there are currently working or just expired. For instance, in Handouts Online you will find at the bottom of the webpage “© Handouts Online 2015” which shows that it is updated. It also has a section where new worksheets and updates are shared regularly.

      Accuracy is also vital when analyzing web sources, you should be careful with those pages that present spelling mistakes or wrong information because that might mean that there is no one who checks or verifies the webpage’s material.

As you can see, there are many ways to check if a website is trustworthy or not. As a librarian and information professional, HopeN. Tillman recommends on her work Evaluating Quality on the Net that “We need to use the same critical evaluative skills in looking for information on the Internet that we would do in a book, a paper index, a musical score, or on an online commercial database”. 

So let’s try to be more critical when looking for activities, videos, texts, etc. on the internet, especially if we are planning to use that material with academic purposes.

DIGITAL IMMIGRANT OR NATIVE?

      We always knew that time creates generational gaps.  This issue has caused struggles between parents and children, as well as between teachers and students from the very beginning. But now, we are facing a phenomenon that has no precedents: the arrival of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

    This phenomenon gave birth to a whole new generation called “Digital Natives”. According to Marc Prensky, Digital Natives “represent the first generation to grow up with new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videos games, digital music players, cell phones, and all other toys and tools of the Digital Age.”  Those who weren’t born in this digital world and are trying to adapt to it, are called by Prensky “Digital Immigrants”.

 What if we had to place ourselves under one of these labels?  Even though we grew up surrounded by technology we perceive some differences between us and younger Digital Natives.  A decade ago, technology was available only for those who had the necessary resources, but nowadays, people from different social classes can easily access to it. What’s more, they represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology.
      So we could say that Digital Natives are constantly evolving with technology, and we as teachers need to be ready to keep up with these new cultural changes. As it is unlikely that newcomers adapt to the old-fashioned methods of teaching-learning, it is our duty to find new ways to narrow the generational gap. Teaching students who are used to access to information instantaneously with what Prensky calls “the step by step” logic, might be a difficult task.

     Virtual games, digital texts, videos, interactive activities, are just some examples of all the things that can be done in the classroom to make it more motivating and appealing for students. The truth is that no matter the techniques that you may implement in teaching, the more we embrace new technology, the more connected we will be with our students. 

    Now, we would like to share with you an APP that you could easily use in the classroom.

In fact, one of us did it and it worked extremely well. Students love each opportunity they have to use their cellphones, so why don't we see that as way of both, motivating and teaching them? Take a look at Duolingo, an App that allows you to learn different languages through interactive activities that actually make you feel you are playing a game. Besides, you can practice listening, speaking and writing skills, and the best of all: it's FREE! and you can downloaded through Google Play from your mobile phone. Give it a chance and let us know how it worked for you!