I do not see myself teaching without technology. Nowadays, technology has become my teaching assistant. All the resources that I use in class or recommend to my students are online, public, free and reusable. Technology is reshaping the actual classroom boundaries and extending them all the way to their living spaces through smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

 

Beyond accessibility, online resources tell me who, when and for how long a student has been visiting a media file or completing an assignment. I know in real time what assignments they have completed and at what specific time did they finish it. All this information helps me to better understand students’ study habits and help me to plan ahead, design activities, gauge activities’ impact or customize individual learning experiences.

 

I benefit enormously from the use of technology in my class and at the same time students profit from it as well. I get lots of feedback, easy student monitoring, and great direct and instant communication. My students benefit because they have better ways to follow up with class content, they get specifically tailored activities and multiple approaches to same content through different platforms. I see this as John Berger’s book “ways of seeing”. Sometimes you need a different perspective, another way to see the same object to get a full understanding of what you have in front of you. Grammar, for example, is like that, it needs to be presented in multiples ways and one of them would catch the student's eye. The smartphone app Duolingo is helping me to distract attention from theory and focus on repetition and pattern self-construction.

 

I do not imagine myself teaching without technology, the same way students do not conceive learning without technology. How am I going to be able to create attractive, engaging and awesome activities without it? For example, put yourself in this situation: the first week of class, after teaching some word sounds and spelling. I ask my students to take a panoramic picture of their bedroom, name all the objects in the room, log on to www.youvisit.com and upload it on our online classroom group chat. Next day, I project a real image of their bedroom on the classroom screen. They have to name all the items and furniture as we are watching their real bedroom. Could a class be more significative than that? How on earth am I going to do that without technology? Can you picture the student’s face when the whole class sees their teddy bear? (Click here to learn more about this activity)  

 

Almost at the end of the semester, I evaluate the creativity of my students and their writing ability. I ask them to log on www.storybird.com and write a story. The nice thing about this web page is that students have to pick an artist, that artist has published a considerable amount of drawing in their portfolio. Students then have to connect their own ideas with the artist’ drawings using a specific target form to write a story. This activity encourages imagination and students have to use a combination of resources, being improvisation one among them, in limited time. (Click here to take a peek at one student’s storybird). 

 

I can write for hours about how the use of technology has changed the way I teach and students learn. However, I will finish introducing my last online resource: www.mindomo.com. This is a web page that allows the public to create an online structured chart with links, establish due dates or add check-mark boxes. I am using this online tool as a class online syllabus and students just love it! They are always in control of what we have covered in class and what will be covered next class. (Click here if you to see how it works).