Plan to Magnetize

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Hello All,

Holding a more expansive view of ELT professionalism is where I find myself after pinpointing the key issues of this week. Beyond my expectations, I keep looking at this reflective mirror with watchful pride: how steadily are my Web skills and capabilities moving upward after such readings?

In actual fact, this week’s TELP was by all means exceptional; a window through which my imagination and instructional curiosity could take a flight into a totally new realm of vivid engagement and glowing creativity. Even so, it took me a time questioning: will technology enhanced lesson plan “make sense” because it only “makes a difference?”

If properly added in, high-tech teaching aids will serve an ultimately revolutionary purpose: to connect the classroom to the outside world, with contacts and experiences that books would never be able to offer. My students learn best from doing more than from just observing. They are found to be challenged, engaged, and more independent when they are asked to go through any technology-assisted classroom practice. From e-mail, multimedia, to on-line classes instruction, things could radically enhance the learning process in schools in various ways.

Nevertheless, if inappropriately used in the classroom, technology can be used to perpetuate old models of teaching and learning. Students can be "plugged into computers" to do drill and practice that is not so different from workbooks. Teachers can rather exploit multimedia and online technology to give more colorful and stimulating tasks. Instructors should be fully aware too to personalize learning, by identifying software/on-line learning activities which can be used to accommodate a learner with unique learning styles, capacities, and multiple intelligences.

While working on my TELP, I kept asking myself: what does it necessitate from me as an instructor? Professional development for teachers, or the lack of, is probably the largest obstacle facing teachers in using technology in their lesson plans.My school is not from those lucky schools which have classroom computers or classroom Internet access, so the dilemma will even be more intensified. Whether the problem is that teachers do not know how to utilize the technology provided, or the lack of the technology itself, lesson plans repeatedly “voice out” their sufferings and frustrations of not having the opportunity to receive their full potentials in some parts of the scholastic and academic world.

Technology-assisted classroom can give you, colleagues, an unbounded access to information. The issue remains of what you can do to turn this information into knowledge.

Thanks anyway to this week’s readings for detailing some of the descriptions of how computers can be used to stimulate and develop reading and writing skills, collaborate with peers in foreign countries, do authentic kinds of research that is valuable to the adult world, and do complex kinds of problem solving that would otherwise be impossible.

Regards,

Hassan