WAYS OF using educational technology
Tazhibayeva S.A.
Master of philology
sciences of International Kazakh-Turkish University, Kazakhstan
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Educational technology has always been about much more than improving learning. In the eyes of many
proponents, it has been about transforming learning -overcoming traditional
educational approaches and supplanting them with revolutionary new paradigms of teaching,
learning, and schooling. The flashy new machine in the classroom - whether the film
projector or the television or the computer - has represented the pinnacle of modernity
in the eyes of its supporters, whether from the government, the business sector, or academia. . New
instruction technologies are known as the most
important function of educational system and scientific researches in this sphere is interested everybody
both theoretically and practically. Using new technology in the right order one of the rules in modernization and
developing of educational system.
There are many ways of teaching and using educational technologies. The work
deals with not all of the techniques, but the some tasks of using new technology.
- Ways of
showing
Over the years,
technology has changed the way that teachers and students are able to show each
other things (one of the most important functions of classroom equipment). We
will look at four major presentation aids.
The board: the most versatile
piece of classroom teaching equipment is the board - whether this is of the
more traditional chalk-dust variety, a whiteboard written on with marker pens,
or an IWB. Boards provide a motivating focal point during whole-class grouping.
We can use boards for a variety of different purposes, including:
Note-pad: teachers frequently
write things up on the board as these come up during the lesson. They might be
words that they want students to remember, have not understood or seen before,
or topics and phrases which they have elicited from students when trying to
build up a composition plan, for example.
When we write up a word
on a board, we can show how that word is stressed so that students can see and
'hear' the word at the same time. We can sketch in intonation tunes or
underline features of spelling, too. We can group words according to their
meaning or grammatical function. Some teachers use different colors for
different aspects of language.
Explanation aid: boards can be used for
explanation, too. For example, we can show the relationship between an
affirmative sentence and a question by drawing connecting arrows. We can show
where words go in a sentence by indicating the best positions diagrammatically,
or we can write up phonemic symbols (or draw diagrams of the mouth) to show how
a word or sound is pronounced.
Picture frame: boards can be used for
drawing pictures, of course, the only limitation being our artistic ability.
But even those who are not artistically gifted can usually draw a sad face and
a happy face. They can produce stick men
sitting down and running, or make an attempt at a bus or a car. What's more,
this can be done whenever it is required because the board is always there,
helping students to understand concepts and words.
Public workbook: a typical procedure is
to write up fill-in sentences or sentence transformation items, for example,
and have individual students come up to the board and write a fill-in item, or
a transformed sentence. That way the whole class becomes involved in seeing
what the correct version is.
Teachers sometimes write mistakes they
have observed in a creative language activity on the board. They can ask class
members who think they know how to correct them to come up and have a go. Such
activities are very useful because they focus everyone's attention in one
place.
The overhead
projector [OHP] Despite modern
computer-based presentation equipment and programs, the OHP (and the
transparencies we use with it) still retains a unique versatility, and, except
for problems with electricity or a bulb, is much more likely to be problem-free
than other more sophisticated pieces of equipment. Just about anything can go
on overhead transparencies (OHTs): we can show whole texts or grammar
exercises, pictures, diagrams or students' writing. Because transparencies can
be put through a photocopier or printed from any computer, they can be of very
high quality. Especially where teachers have handwriting that tends to be
unclear, the overhead transparency offers the possibility of attractive
well-printed script [1].
One of the major advantages of the overhead projector is that we don't
have to show everything on an OHT all at once. By covering some of the
transparency with a piece of card or paper, we can blank out what we don't want
the students to see. So, for example, we might show the first two lines of a
story and ask students what is going to happen next, before revealing the next
two lines and then the next, gradually moving the paper or card downwards. We
might have questions on one side of the transparency and answers on the other.
We start the teaching sequence with the answers covered, and use the same
gradual revelation technique to maintain interest.
The flip
chart: Flip charts are very useful for making
notes, recording the main points in a group discussion, amending and changing
points, and for the fact that individual sheets of paper can be torn off and
kept for future reference. Many of these qualities (and more) are, of course, shared
by computer-based technology, but flip charts are portable, relatively cheap
and demand no technical expertise. Flip charts work best in two particular
situations. In the first, a teacher, group leader or group scribe stands at the
flip chart and records the points that are being made. The participants -
because they can see what is being written up - can then ask for changes to be
made.
When possible, it is ideal if groups can
each have flip charts of their own. When an activity is finished, students can
walk round the room seeing what the different groups have written (or what
points they have noted down). Flip charts can also be posted at different
points in the room, each flip chart standing for a topic or a point of view.
Students can walk around, adding to what is on each of the flip charts, writing
tip their opinions, disagreeing or merely getting an idea of what the other
students are thinking, based on what is already written there.
Computer-based
presentation technology: Computers
have changed the world of classroom presentation forever - that is for those
fortunate enough to have the money and resources for both hardware and
software.
The two crucial pieces
of hardware are a computer and a data projector. Anything that is on our
computer screen can be shown to the whole class using a data projector to put
up an enlarged version of it on a screen or a white wall. This means that all
the class can see a word-processed task at the same time, or we can project a
picture, diagram or map, for example. Presentation software, such as
PowerPoint, increases our capacity to present visual material (words, graphics
and pictures) in a dynamic and interesting way.
One of the major
technological developments in the last few years has been the interactive whiteboard,
the IWB. This has the same properties as a computer hooked up to a data
projector (i.e. you can present visual material, Internet pages, etc. in a
magnified way for everyone to see), but it has three major extra advantages,
too. In the first place, teachers and students can write on the board
which the images are being projected onto, and they can manipulate images on
the board with the use of special pens or even with nothing but their fingers.
The pen or finger thus acts as a kind of computer mouse. Secondly, what
appears on the board (just like the screen of a computer) can be saved or
printed so that anything written up or being shown there can be looked at again
[1].
Enthusiasts for IWBs
point to this extraordinary versatility and to other tricks (such as the
ability to mask parts of the board and gradually reveal information). They say
that the ability to move text and graphics around the board with pen or finger
is extremely attractive, especially for younger learners. They emphasize the
fact that text graphics, Internet capability, video and audio material can all
be controlled from the board.
- Ways of listening
Students get exposure to
spoken language from a variety of sources. Much of it comes from the teacher,
whose voice represents the single most important source of language input.
Students also get language input from listening to each other and from any
visiting teachers, lecturers or classroom guests.
It is still extremely common for teachers
and students to listen to recorded audio material on cassette recorders. Tape
recorders are versatile, cheap and convenient and, when they have efficient
rewind and fast forward buttons and tape counters, they are extremely easy to u
Many teachers also use CD players, which have some of the same advantages as
tape recorder though they are often bulkier and have counter systems that are
sometimes more difficult use efficiently than those of older tape recorder
models.
However, recorded material is now available (as is video material) in
digital formats such as WAV and MP3. What this means in practical terms is that
we can play material direct from computers and MP3 players. This has
revolutionized access to listening, especially for individual listeners. The
availability of podcasts (that is, downloadable files which the user ca load
onto their own personal MP3 players such as iPods - or, increasingly, mobile
phones) means that students (and teachers) can listen to a range of material
whenever they want to on devices that are so small that they are not difficult
to carry around. Teachers and students can go, for example, to Podcast.net and
search the site for ESL material. A search engine like Google will also enable
us to find a huge variety of ESL and general podcast material [2].
- Ways of finding out
It has never been as
easy to find things out as it is in the twenty-first century. The wide range of
reference material both online and offline (in the form of CDs) is almost
infinite. This is especially useful for language learners.
Dictionaries:
Students can access dictionaries in book
form, on CD-ROMS, using small electronic handsets and on the web. We will look
at these in turn.
•
Paper dictionaries: dictionaries
printed in book form
have changed dramatically in
the last few years. Whereas in the
past, they were monochrome, with forbidding-looking
entries which used various codes to denote different aspects of meaning, now
they are colorful and laid out in a way that makes issues such as frequency,
collocation, different meanings, pronunciation, etc. extremely clear.
• CD-ROMs: paper
dictionaries are limited by the size of book that users are prepared to carry
around with them. The same is not true of CD-ROMs, which can include a significantly greater amount of information
(including audio material). Not only that, but CD-ROMs have one huge advantage,
which is that users no longer have to search alphabetically. They can type in a
word or phrase and it will appear on the screen, together with features such as
collection information, more corpus examples, a phrase-store, and even
thesaurus-type word stores. Students can also hear the words being spoken and,
perhaps, record themselves to compare with the spoken original.
Electronic
pocket dictionaries: many
students like to carry around small electronic-dictionaries which fit snugly
into their pockets. Teachers sometimes find these problematic since students
tend to refer to them frequently in lessons at times when we would prefer them
not to be accessing such little machines. However, a more problematical issue
has, in the past, been the size of the display screen and the information that
is included in the dictionaries. Small screens mean that users are never going
to get any of the incidental or insightful (and frequently unexpected) detail
that we get when we look at a dictionary page or a computer screen.
Furthermore, students have to scroll up and down continuously to find what they
are looking for.
Recently, however,
electronic dictionaries have improved somewhat. In the first place, the screens
are bigger, and in the second place, more than one dictionary is often used. Users
can hear the words being spoken, too, and there are often extras such as
spellcheckers, currency converters, etc.
Many
teachers would still prefer students to use paper or computer based
dictionaries. But the rule of the small electronic models is powerful. We must
hope that they continue to buy them.
• Online dictionaries: finally many
dictionaries are now freely available online
(although users may have to go through a complex registration process to be
granted access).
Concordances: Concordances search
large corpora of language for a word or word-string that we want to know about.
There are many powerful concordancing packages, but first-time users may want
to try a free site at www.lextutor.ca. Users can type in a request to
see 50 lines which include the search word by completing various boxes. By
checking the correct boxes we can ask for the lines to be sorted
alphabetically, based on the word that comes immediately before the search
word. This is sometimes called left-sorting (because the words listed
alphabetically are to the left of the search word).
Concordances are
especially useful for students and teachers who want to do word research. We
can also use them to design material. For example, we could print off a
concordance but blank out the search word; the students have to guess what the
word is. We could ask students to predict the most common words that come
before and after the search word and then get them to look at the concordance
lines to see if they were right [2].
Searching
the Internet: The greatest source of
information not in book form is, of course, the Internet. However, its sheer
size and range make it potentially awkward for users, who often find it
difficult to locate the exact information they are looking for. This is partly
because searching is a skill in itself which students and teachers need to
acquire. For example, suppose students were doing a project on the theatre
where Shakespeare's plays were first performed and they wanted to know its
location, it would be unwise of them just to type the word Shakespeare into
the popular search engine Google, because they would be offered more than 51
million sites and the vast majority of them would be irrelevant. However, if
they typed in what they were really looking for in more detail (e.g.
Shakespeare Elizabethan theatre location), they would only be offered
around 420,000 sites (at the time of writing), and the first few would be of
immediate relevance. Many of the others would include the words theatre and
location, but would have nothing to do with Shakespeare. A way of
searching precisely, however, is to type what we are looking for between
inverted commas, e.g. 'Shakespeare in Love' (the name of a fictional
film about Shakespeare's life). We will then get references to that film,
whereas if we type in the phrase without the inverted commas, we will get many
hits about Shakespeare and many unconnected hits on the subject of love. It is important
if we want student searches to be successful, therefore, that the students know
how to search effectively.
Both teachers and
students can, as we have said, find almost anything they want on the Internet.
They can go to online newspapers or broadcasting associations such as the BBC
or CNN; they can find song lyrics or access history sites; they can find film
guides and jokes sites. Two particular kinds of site are worth talking about in
more detail, however.
• Using
encyclopedias: there are a number of encyclopedia sites (and other
information sites, such as biograpln.com) on the Internet. In their book about
using technology in language teaching, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly suggest
giving students charts to fill in about, say, a country, as part of a longer
project [1]. They can be asked to locate the capital city, population, main
languages, main cities, economy, geography, sea ports, political system, etc.
Students in groups of three can look for this information on three different
sites: encyclopedia.com, britannica.com and wikipedia.com (Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia where any user can add to or change the information available). They
can then share their information and see if the three sites agree on the
information they looked for.
- Ways of composing
Computers and the
Internet offer many opportunities for students and teachers to compose material
in ways other than using pencils, pens and paper. We will examine some of the
increasingly common methods of creating material both by and for students and
teachers.
Word
processing, word editing: In our
everyday lives computers are used for writing letters, putting books together,
composing reports, completing homework assignments and making lists. Of course,
this can all be clone by using a pen and paper. In a classroom situation when
groups of writers are involved in a joint composition, we can group the
students around a flip chart and have them work together with one student
acting as scribe. However, when students working in groups are using word
processing software, anyone can offer and execute changes without causing
unattractive crossing out, or forcing the scribe to throw a page (or sheet of
paper) away and start again.
Word processed work
allows teachers to give feedback in a different way, too. We can use dedicated software sub menus such
as Track Changes in Microsoft Word to show where things have gone wrong or
simply give comments and corrections in a different font color from the
student's original text.
Mouse pals,
chat and blogging: Before
computers, teachers were keen for their students to correspond with pen pals in
different countries. This was to give students both meaningful and memorable
experiences of using English, and also to help them to an appreciation of
different cultures around the world.
Pen pals have now morphed into mousepals
and key pals; students can send each other emails instead of letters, and where
such contact is well supervised and actively promoted by teachers, the benefits
are soon evident. However, students will need constant attention to help them
to sustain their motivation for the task.
Students can also be involved in chatting
online. Indeed many of them already do it both in their first language and in
English. Teachers can organize real-time chatting events using programs such as
Googletalk or MSN Messenger. It is also easy to set up groups where
people exchange messages with each other, such as Yahoo Groups where
people who share the same interest can post messages and reply to them.
One of the most potent
ways of telling people what we are thinking (and for sharing facts and events
in our lives) is the weblog or blog. This is, in a sense, a public diary which
anyone can read. Teachers sometimes write a blog to tell students how they are
doing and what they should do next. Students or groups of students can write a
diary - an instant autobiography - to tell others what they are doing and to
provide feedback on how their learning is going [3].
Blogging is not difficult and there are many sites, such as blogger.com,
which tell users how to make use of this particular resource.
Authoring: Of considerable interest to teachers are the many
sites that allow us to download software to enable us to design our own
web-based material. (This enables us to provide practice material for our
students that is especially appropriate to them.) The aim of such sites is to
allow teachers to key in or import their own text and then, by using the
software provided, create a variety of different exercises. Perhaps the most
popular of these is the Hot Potatoes site at http://hotpot.uvic.ca. We
can choose whether we want students to be given multiple-choice exercises,
short answer exercises, jumbled sentences, crosswords, etc. and the authoring
software provides us with the type of exercise we have requested.
Designing
websites: Many teachers design their own websites
and even get students to make their own class websites, too. When these are put
on the worldwide web (thanks to Tripod
and Geocities - services of Lycos and Yahoo! respectively), anyone is
allowed to visit them.
Web design is not nearly as complex as it
might seem. While professional software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and
Adobe Go Live might seem a bit daunting to the beginner, Microsoft
FrontPage, for example, is relatively straightforward.
Students will enjoy making their own
website. Teachers can put anything they want on the web, and for private
teachers, a website is an excellent way to advertise their presence.
Virtual
learning: from emails to simulated environments: The easiest way of organizing teaching, swapping material and giving
feedback to students using IT is via email. Teachers can set assignments, have
'conversations' with students and give feedback on student work. However, there
are Internet-based software programs designed specifically to offer teaching
and training environments online.
There are a number of online courses for both students and teachers of
English. These range from the downright shoddy (i.e. not worth the time that users
spend on them) to serious attempts to facilitate successful learning even when
groups of students are not physically present in the same space.
It is now possible to train for almost anything online, and training for
English teachers is no exception. However, there is a significant difference
between teacher training courses that can, apparently, be completed on websites
in just a few hours, and well-designed virtual learner environments (VLEs). The
idea of a VLE is that course content (including written text, audio and video
lecture clips) can be stored on a website which only course participants can
access. Some VLEs also contain blogs (see above) and have chat sites both in
prearranged real time and on message boards where users can post their
comments and read what others have to say. There are various platforms for VLEs
(or learner management systems as they are sometimes called), including the
increasingly popular Moodle (which is free), and Blackboard and First Class
(which are not). Most VLE sites also allow for real-time tutoring so that
wherever participants are situated geographically, they can participate in
tutorials and even A more profound learning experience takes place when we
enter a new virtual world where we can move around in different buildings and
different environments. Education is such a place, where people can 'go
to' an island and walk around it, taking part in training activities in
different buildings [4]
REFERENCES
1
Dudeney, G and Hockly, N 2007 How to teach English with technology-'
Pearson Education
Ltd. 46-51
2
Block,
D 1991 Some thoughts on D1Y
materials design. ELY Journal 45/3
3
Osin,
L. (1998). Computers in education in developing countries: Why
and how? (Education
and Technology Series
Volume3, Number 1). Washington, DC: World Bank Education
and Technology Team.
4
Sandholtz,
J. H., Ringstaff, C, & Dwyer, D. C. (1997). Teaching with
technology: Creating
student-centered classrooms. New York: Teachers
College Press.