PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOLOGY USE IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOLOGY USE IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

Teaching is not only trasmiting virtual content or assigning online homework. educatos also need to knok the Principles of Technology. These principles involve knowing your students choosing the righ material, language use and be aware of thechallenges that might pop up during teaching practice.

Know Your Students

            In order to use IT on an ongoing basis in your lessons, it is important to become familiar with your own students’ familiarity with technology. Most students will readily text message a friend on their cell phone, or know how to access a social networking site such as, or download music to their iPods and MP3 players but this does not necessarily mean they are techno-literate.

               However, it is very important to be aware that teachers cannot expect students to learn technology and English and content all at the same time. Remember, just as teachers need to take baby steps when trying to infuse technology, so too do students when they are equally trying to get their heads around the technology.

Choosing Materials

            Instructional technology is marvelous for accessing authentic materials as well as creating original resources. Well, as teachers we need to be aware of creating tasks that fit the students in terms of their learning potential and computer literacy level (Chapelle, 2001). In addition, venturing out from students’ strengths can serve to motivate especially ELLs to use the specific aspect of English they need to master (Erben, Ban, Jin, & Summers, 2007). Erben et al. suggest that using purposeful and contextualized IT materials allow students to apply their knowledge of their world to content and language learning tasks. For ELLs this translates into the following potential IT activities:

• For ELLs at the preproduction stage (level 1), choosing technology that supports text with images such as photos, graphs, or charts is highly advisable since it links text with its visual representation and acts equally as a mnemonic device.

• For ELLs at the early production stage (level 2), in addition to those listed for level 1 ELLs, choosing ITs that promote vocabulary, grammar, and listening acquisition such as exercise builders, as well as digital stories, audio podcasts and online videos (YouTube) is recommended since all ELLs will go through a silent period when learning English. This means that, before speaking, ELLs will spend a lot of time just trying to understand their linguistic environment. To help them at this time it is more important to create language rich opportunities to further their listening comprehension strategies.

• For ELLs at the intermediate fluency stage (level 3), in addition to those listed for level 1 and 2 ELLs, it is important to use ITs that promote speaking, reading and writing skills such as synchronous VoIPs (skype.com, gizmo.com), online elaborated texts and process writing tools such as writeboard.com.

• For ELLs at the speech emergent stage (level 4), in addition to those listed for level 1, 2, and 3 ELLs, it is important to promote an ELLs CALP, in other words, their subject-specific language ability. ITs that would naturally support this are tools that work in tandem with each other. Examples of this include a website or VLE that combines multiple links to e-communication tools, e-listening tools, e-creation tools, and e-assessment tools (see Part 3).

Students Working with Technology

            One of the biggest challenges of technology integration into classroom tasks is the shift in the role of the teacher (Doering & Beach, 2002; Parks, Huot, Hamers, & Lemonnier, 2003). As our nine-point continuum of IT use indicates, it is inevitable that, the more a teacher employs instructional technology in the classroom, the less teacher-centered and the more student-centered a classroom will become. Technology-enhanced classrooms have been found to promote discovery learning, learner autonomy, and learner-centeredness. In 2000, Kramsch, A’Ness, and Lam pointed out that new ITs are changing our very concept of authorship. Students not only write text but change the very rules by which texts are written (Warschauer, 2006). In other words, new ITs are creating new possibilities of student agency. For ELLs this translates into ELLs directly seeing the results of their learning choices in terms of ever-increasing English language abilities. A further means by which teachers can promote learner autonomy through the infusion of ITs is to allow students to work collaboratively in pairs or small groups where they can engage in interactive problem-solving or cooperative projects.

Language Use

            Research in language learning and IT use in classroom settings has over the years clearly come out in favor of its beneficial effects on second language development (Lee, 2004; Belz, 2001). Especially in networked collaborative interactions, use of emails, bulletin boards, and chat rooms has been found to promote lively exchanges between native and non-native speakers in addition to fostering scaffolding of ideas and grammar (Toyoda & Harrison, 2002). More importantly, using ITs to foster collaborative communication among students has been shown to foster proficiency in all language skill areas—speaking, writing, reading, and listening, including intercultural communication (Jin & Erben, 2007).

Challenges of Technology Use in Classrooms

            Whenever one is working with ITs one needs to be aware of the potential frustrations and how to avoid them. At the most basic level are the “technical difficulties,” which serve to frustrate teachers more than anything else. These “technical difficulties” can range anywhere from a burnt out bulb on an overhead projector to the computer screen freezing on you during the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. Other potential problem situations, especially those that can create classroom management situations, are when the teacher has students visit a website to conduct research and many of the links on the website are broken or when the students are ready to utilize a particular online tool and the server that hosts the website is temporarily down.

            There are also other types of limitations with which teachers should be familiar. In many school districts across the country, school district administrations have security blocks in place so that students cannot access questionable sites from school computers.