Thinking back to the time I started exploring about all these new means applied to ELT, I have never thought this would be such a fruitful process. Not only have I made quite a number of artifacts, but more importantly, I started to approach technology with a thought of its application to ELT.
Language is omnipresent in our daily life and is undoubtedly of a wide variety of usage. Even if the basic underlying form of the language is consistent, its representation and usage is ever changing. Therefore, in order to better relate learners to the subject matter, it is best to derive learning items from students’ daily life. With the characteristics allowing frequent updates, technology allows teachers to modify and create learning materials with less effort while engaging learners at the same time. One artifact I particularly like is the flipping of YouTube video provided by Ted-Ed allowing users to create a listening comprehension task out of any video on YouTube, which is a very user-friendly technology. This allows the most up-to-date information and language use to be presented to learners without tremendous effort out by teachers.
Apart from allowing learning materials to be up-to-date, technology can help in training learners’ autonomy in learning. In nurturing life-long learners and self learners, which is the increasingly important aim of education, technology is of great use as it fosters autonomy in learners. Take podcasting as an example, learners can gain access to the recording as long as they have a computer and Internet access, making them able to listen and practice as many times and whenever they like. Also, in keeping a class blog or a teacher’s blogfolio, it can create another platform where learning and teaching take place. Students can voluntarily interact more with the teacher either with questions in mind or simply for a sharing purpose.
The picture below is a telescope on an old map. Just as sailors in the history believing that there is new land out in the ocean in addition to where they are living, I also believe that resources on the Internet are immensely rich, not confined to what we already knew, and may even be ever-expanding, which deserves our constant exploration. New technology becomes prevalent, and new ways of adapting technology to ELT is created. Therefore, I should keep an open mind and adapt to and adopt new ELT techniques to my classroom. The journey with technology is surely a never ending one!
Constant exploration
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