Multimedia Resources & ICTs (1)

Recursos Multimedia y el uso de Internet en el aula
"Los ordenadores no sustituirán nunca a los profesores, pero los profesores con conocimientos informáticos sí sustituirán a quienes no los tengan." (CALICO Conference, 1993)

You may wonder, 'Why do I have to learn to use these new technologies and computer-based resources? What's the benefit, for me or my students? What if I decide not to apply them, do I really have a choice here?'

One reason why you should learn about new ICTs and, particulary, how to apply them in your English classrooms is summarized in the quotation above. In my view, it's not the most important reason, though. The most important reason is that one needs to go with the times. Remember how only a few years ago we were reluctant to use the cell phone or to 'abuse' it, as some would say, and we would refuse to give our number as freely and naturally as we do nowadays? Time has passed, and the cell phone now is ubiquitous (as well as multi-faceted), isn't it? Well, the same goes for other new technologies, and we need to learn to use them if only because we don't want to lose face in class, when we hear our students talk about how they are going to send class notes to each other through their scribd or writely accounts, for instance, or how they've seen the pictures from the weekend on somebody's facebook, or how they're going to create a blog to share their opinions and experiences about the school trip.

We live in a digital society, we share a digital culture, and therefore we need a digital language to communicate and even simply to be in this society. That this is the era of the computer is undeniable, and refusing to freshen up our teaching skills with the introduction of ICTs into our teaching schemes would not be a very wise thing to do. Of course, one does not necessarily apply all the new technologies of information and communication, but being at least acquainted with the most widespread ones, the differences between them, and their likely applications in the EFL classroom would be a good starting point.

Then, let me tell you, ICTs are like the Pringles potato chips, "once you pop, you just can't stop!".

In this blog you'll find posts about a variety of multimedia resources and the different uses of the Internet in the EFL classroom that I mentioned in our 1st session (Feb 2nd, 2009). Please, use this blog as a forum to exchange views about the uses of these technologies, and to share experiences in their application in the language classroom (either your own experiences, or someone else's), how these experiences worked, likely language learning benefits for your students, limitations in their application in your particular school contexts, links to websites of interest for your fellow teachers or your language students, etc. Also, to communicate with me (apart from my email account, that I check every day).