Teacher Training #4

Hi! I hope everyone is doing well.

This week was the fourth week of our training, we are getting close to the end already! Before I mentioned what we did in this week lesson I should tell you all that we decided our groups for our end project. We have couple ideas that we have in mind but nothing clear yet.

So, this week we talk about integrating technology into teaching of English. There is no doubt that technology effecting every bit of our lives and we talk about what can we do to make this experience better for our learners, what are some barriers we can encounter and how to solve them. Of course there are problems that we cannot solve our own like foundational needs for technological use in school such as need for electricity, the lack of technological devices etc. The areas that we can help are to create and use relevant tools for the learning goals and objectives and make these tools engaging for learners to use. In addition to this, to address the demands, we need to test technology to determine its appropriateness, ensuring that privacy settings align with student privacy. We need to introduce new technologies to the students and explain how and why it is relevant to student learning.

We also shared our general fears about these issues and try to find solutions for each of them. The general idea was to not give up in the hard situation and always have a plan B or even a plan C because we can't always predict what will happen. My concern was that learning knowledge is like finding the exit in a maze. The longer you spend time in the maze the more familiar you get to the grounds, and eventually you find the exit and you never get lost in it again. It can be time consuming, you may get lost a lot but you learn. Technology is like giving a map to the person who is in the maze. They know exactly where they are going and they can get to the exit faster and easier. The problem is that if they are sent there again without a map they will get lost, also because they never lift their faces from the map they don’t know anything about the maze. They did not spend enough time to figure out themselves. It makes the knowledge they learn less permanent I think and I found the solution that I can deal with this using a variety of different activities to teach the same content or use different approaches for every different types of learners.

So, as pre-sevice teachers and on-service teachers we need to know how to use technology and why we use it. We need digital literacy to understand, search, evaluate and organize what we need to know and use. Also we need to make students aware of the reasons why we use technology in the classroom and make them more comfortable around the technology