To Web, or not to Web; that is the question!
It can seem madness. You JUST think you have the hang of Powerpoints, and embedding video and using blogs and someone shows you Prezi. And starts talking about Web2 applications that you didn’t even DREAM existed … And don’t even start me on the hardware that makes delivering and accessing information something that can keep you going – quite literally – 24/7/365.
It can seem like there’s a chaotic deluge – a downpour; a flood! – that threatens to sweep you away, and with it, everything you thought you ever knew and believed in about the teaching of English. Which is (he says, answering the unasked question implicitly posed by his own unasked rhetorical assertion) that what is critical is the relationship between student/s and teacher; and what underpins that is effective communication. So – surely – it’s more about the face2face and the chalkface than all this technological hysteria?
Well, yes – of course – it is. And isn’t. Teaching – my teaching – has changed. I no longer leave school with a pile of marking at the end of the day – or weekend – and know that’s it. I know that every night, my students will check out the Wiki, or blog; every night a couple will email work, often quite late – and ask a question that, without an immediate response, would have stymied them. Teaching is more constant, and if the protest that springs to lips is that that makes it more demanding, and if it’s flippant to note that that is the way of the world, it is no less true to note that my teaching feels more rewarding, as more students are engaged – CAN be engaged – in more ways, in more depth, and just as personally (because the chalkface is still there!)
So communication IS the key, but I don’t have to depend on a single lesson every two or three days to hit and hope that I’m impressive enough and they are receptive enough for it to stick. I don’t have to try to be all things in one lesson: a teacher for kinetic, aural and visual learners, because I can provide some of that breadth of stimulus online. And I am finding that as much as the Net makes for a great delivery platform, it also provides great variety in HOW that content CAN be offered.
The skill that teachers need to work on now is to plan a spectrum of systems and strategies that fit their teaching styles, their material and their students. A hit-and-miss hot-pot will be no more successful using IT than it woudl have been if you bustled into class one day with an armful of coloured papers and scissors; the next with spelling books followed by grammar exercises … And the key – as ever was! – is time, and making the best use of that which you have!
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