Friday, March 2, 2012


How would I use blogs, wikis and delicious with my EFL students?





When I become a teacher I will use different types of technology tools to help me teach, interact and communicate with my students effectively, for example I would use blogs, wikis and delicious to enhance my students skills.


 
Blogs:
Is a type of a website or part of a website, Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, description of events or other materials such as graphics or videos.
Using blogs will improve the writing skills for my students by making them think critically and expressing themselves by sharing their opinions and ideas, they will learn English by writing it and also by commenting in each other’s blogs.


Wiki:
Is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management system.
I would use wiki with my students by posting a lesson and wait for them to respond about what they have learnt from it and what issues they did not understand, it helps them to ask questions and interact with me and the other students,Wiki allows teachers and students to work closely together on a topic and help the students to be more collaborative in the learning process.
Delicious:
Is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering webbookmarks.
I would share useful websites with my students to help them learn grammar and vocabularies, for example by giving them websites offers activities and exercises and also they can share it with the other students to cooperate and learn from each other.

To conclude by these technologies, the learning and teaching process will be more interesting and enjoyable for students, they will be motivated to learn and understand new topics and also improve their skills.


Digital Natives,Digital Immigrants



I consider my self as a digital native student, defining digital native students according to Marc Prensky they are native students who grew up using technology, unlike digital immigrant teachers who were not born in the digital world but later on they adopted many aspects of the new technology. He also showed some differences between digital immigrant teachers and digital native students, for example digital immigrant teachers prefer to teach slowly step by step, they also do not believe that students can learn effectively while watching TV or listening to music, they want to teach their students the same way they have been taught, in contrast to digital native students they prefer to learn fast, parallel and multi-task their work process, they also prefer playing games to serious work and graphics grab their attention before texts.

Prensky defined digital immigrant teachers accent as foot in the past, no matter how they become capable of learning the digital style, they still have something in their accent shows that they learnt it from the native digital students, for instance they print out a document rather than just editing it from the screen, they also show their students in class to see an interesting website rather than just sending them the URL because they might not know how to send it via email.
Prensky’s point of view about the biggest serious problem facing education today is that the digital immigrant teachers are struggling to teach the students who speak an entirely new language.
He was confused whether the digital native students have to learn the old way or should their digital immigrants learn the new style, so he gave two suggestions which are:
·     Firstly is the methodology of learning should be that the teachers must learn to communicate in the language and style of their students, this does not mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills, but it does mean going faster, less step by step, more in parallel, with more random access among other things.

·     Secondly is the content; there are two kinds of content:
1) Legacy content.  2) Future content.
The legacy content is our traditional curriculum that includes reading, writing, and arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past etc., it is still important but from a different era, Some of it will continue to be important but some will become less.
The future content is a large extent, digital and technological. It includes software, hardware, robotic, nanotechnology, genomics and many more. It also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them. The future content is interesting to today's students and some people suggested that children should be allowed to use computers as a tool in school.

Prensky’s own preference for teaching digital natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
So if digital immigrant educators really want to reach digital native students they will have to change, so they must stop grousing and as the Nike motto of the digital native generation says, “just do it!”  It is a message for teachers to change their curriculum quickly in order to teach students effectively, the results will be positive and the students will succeed in the long run and their successes will come much sooner if their teachers support them.