Week 3 Reflection
In the article "Best Practices in Technology and Language Teaching", three statements attracted my attention:
1) "Technology allows us to reduce contact time between teacher and student, while maintaning quality of instruction and achieving comparable learning outcomes (p. 231)"
In the high school where I teach, classes are 35 students in average. They are sitting in row, each two share one table. This structure is no longer suitable to this generation. School need more than reform; they need restructuring. I beliive that students can learn much better using methodology-based technology than in the classroom where the setting is boring and there are a lot of distractions.
2) "The potential of using cell phones as devices for language learning is not even fully understood yet. Applications for mobile telephones for language learning will require creativity and careful planning, just as was required when computers were first introduced into the language classroom. New pedagogies that make effective use of these devices will develop rapidly (p. 232)"
The vast majority of my students have mobile phones. I always think about how to integrate these devices into teaching English. I am planning to download some files of pronunciation of vocabulary and I will ask my students to explore learning vocabulary from their mobile phones
3) "a computer is not a substitute for a teacher, and it cannot transform a bad teacher into a good one (p. 232)"
I totally agree. What matters most is not technology, but methodology
Ahmad
4 comments:
Ahmad,
When you mention the situation with your school, I couldn't help but comparing it to our schools in my country. Most of the schools have the same problem, large classes and no space for doing different activities with the students. In some cases there are some classes with 40 or 50 students, and the principal wants them to be quiet in the class because that's how they think people learn.
I hope some day things can change and have better conditions for the students to learn.
Who is the writer of this article. You have picked up gems from the articles.
Hi Ahmed,
when I read the description of your class settings, I thought I must tell you about ours in my institution.Our students used to sit in rows and like yours sharing one table for two. The administration came up with a great idea, using benches instead of chairs , you know like those we find in amphitheaters in university and to top it all, they welded them to the ground so we can't move them.Now, I could no longer circle my students around me.Students have to be contorsionists to do group work or any type of collaborative assignments.
Hassina
Dear Ahmad,
You really picked uo the gems from the article. I liked especially the third one, and I totally agree that technology - as well as the physical environment, the textbook, or any tools or medias available - can turn a bad teacher into a good one. I would like to share with you a sentence I found in blog once (a teacher's one!) that complements this idea: "Any teacher that can be replaced by technology deserves to be" (David Thornburg). I'll share it in my blog.
Marcia
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