My Final Thoughts on My Learning Journey in MAE 812

It's been a fruitful yet thought-provoking journey during the past ten weeks....I thought I've always been one of those teachers who uses ICT confidently in the language classroom and know why I am using it. Not after going through this course, though. There is so much that I don't know about ICT - the advancement in the technology itself, the objectives of using ICT for a language classroom, the many digital resources that is available out there and what makes an effective digital resource in the first place. So, what is my personal outcome after this journey?

Firstly, I would say that this journey is far from over. On a personal goal, as an individual, I've realised that I am not updated on the advancement in technology as much as I think I should. There are many language resources available online that I am not aware of. This course has exposed me to some of these digital resources and so, the next step for me would be to try them out in my language classroom so that my pupils can gain some learning from them. I also should keep abreast of the kind of ICT activities and tools that the Net-gen kids are involved in so that I can better understand their skills and tap on their expertise in ICT. The course also reaffirmed the importance of designing a student-centred learning environment for an effective language classroom. More importantly, the design of an ICT based lesson should support the pedagogy in the teaching of the language and not the other way round. As a teacher, that should be my first priority. I must also be willing to learn from my pupils and see them as partners in my classroom. Pupils wil gain more if there are mutual learning between them and between me and them. With the introduction to Chapelle's model, I am in a better position to assess the digital resources available for my use.

Through attending this course, I realised the importance of a teacher to understand why there is a need to use ICT in a language classroom. It is not about the 'what' of ICT but to understand how effective ICT can be as an effective tool and resource to teach the language. On a collegial goal, I see the need for me to share and educate my colleagues on how ICT can be an effective tool in the teaching of the language. They need to know why they are using ICT. They need to realise that an effective language classroom starts with a good pedagogical lesson plan (Clear, Relevant, Interesting, Short and Productive). They also need to be convinced that planning an ICT-based lesson may take up more time but will eventually save time over time. Their mindset also needs to be changed; they should be willing to work closely with the pupils, learn from them and tap on their expertise.

Once every teacher in the school is clear on the role of ICT in a language classroom, the school can then work on its institutional goals with regards to the use of ICT in one's teaching. The school can then build up on its ICT culture and uses it to teach across subjects so as to maximise the benefits of using ICT in one's classroom. Assessment modes need to be looked into so that pupils will be assessed fairly on the skills and objectives achieved with the use of ICT in the classroom.

Piecing it Together

I. Know
A. ICT motivates teachers and pupils

B. It involves the use of IT tools and software

C. Not all teachers are comfortable in teaching language using ICT

D. Most of the time, lesson plans are designed to support the use of IT and not using IT to support pedagogy.

E. Availability of internet resources, educational CD-roms

II. Want to know
A. How do we know that pupils have acquired the language skills taught through using ICT although the ICT lesson motivates them more?

B. How do we then convince ourselves and our colleagues the importance of using ICT in the language classroom?

C. How do we decide which ICT tools and resources are suitable in the teaching of the EL language?

D. How do we monitor pupils' learning through an ICT classroom?

E. Effectiveness of digital resources
- How do we know which digital resource to use to teach language and is it suitable for our pupils?

F. What changes must be made to ensure the effectiveness of an ICT lesson?
1. Types of assesment modes
- What kind of assessement tools should be in place for an ICT langauage classroom?
2. Teachers' mindset
- How do we change the teachers midnset on viewing students as assets, working together and learning from each other so that their strengths in ICT can be tapped upon?
3. Pre-requisite of teachers
- What are some of the pre-requisite that a teacher should have before he or she can be an effective teacher in a language classroom?

III. Learn

A. The use of ICT in the language classroom should support pedagogy and not the other way round

B. An effective ICT-based lesson first begins with an effective language lesson plan with CRISP objectives

Clear
Relevant
Interesting
Short
Productive

C. An effective ICT based language classroom focuses on a student-centred environment

D. Framework on assessing Digital resources

E. The importance of ICT

1. A lifeskill lesson - pupils should not have fear of the computer just like not having the fear of swimming
2. It can enhance teaching provided
a. teachers themselves know why ICT is important in langauge teaching
b. teachers adopt the prinicple of a mixing desk in an ICT language classroom

F. Availability of Digital resources like Corpus, Online Dictionary & Thesaurus, etc

G. Importance of tapping on Pupils’ Strength in the world of ICT
- teachers should not feel threatened by the lack of knowledge in the area and must be willing to view pupils as partners in using ICT in their language classroom.
- teachers must be willing to learn from the pupils themselves and with their knowledge on what constitutes a good education, they will enhance their teaching and the pupils’ learning.

H. Importance of the Change in Teachers’ Mindset
- teachers should keep themselves updated in the world of ICT
- teachers should not feel that it is time wasted with the planning of ICT but to believe that over time, they can actually save time as the use of ICT opens up the many other windows to access and share knowledge worldwide.

I. The need to change the nature of assessment so that pupils are assessed fairly on the learning that has taken place in an ICT language class.

My first hands-on experience

So, I've been tasked or rather encouraged to explore digital media that is available in this era and see for myself how it can actually play an important role in someone's life today, be it in terms of providing information, as a tool at work or as a means of communication and social networking or simply a form of recreation in one's life.

I decided to give a go at an online game which my own children are playing - The Club Penguin. With my youngest son as my mentor, I began my journey... Logging in the game was easy but navigating myself through the game was otherwise. In this game, we are all penguins who are able to select the country that we would like to visit. In each country, there will be several places of visit and in each place, there will be a number of rooms that we can enter. There will be different games available in each room and our mission is to collect as many coins as we can.

This game allows people to communicate with one another through the chat function and you can always invite others to be your friend. This allow people to play a virtual game with their friend without having to see each other physically. As I was playing, I realised that I could not click on the arrow key as fast as my son could while playing the game, thus losing the game most of the time. I guess they are more accustomed to moving their fingers around the keyboard as children nowadays are exposed to the computer from such a young age.

The game is very interactive, colourful and the animation makes the characters in the club comes alive. It is no wonder why my children cannot stop playing once they start! It is easy to be absorbed in the game, especially so when you have friends to play with.

Digital media is really here to stay, like it or not!

The BIG Move...

Yes, so how do we do it? Where do we start? As it is, the internet network is already complicated enough. What's more when a virtual world exists for the Net-Gen Kids and it seems to mean the whole world to them. Imagine how shocked I was to learn about this virtual world called 'The Second Life". If these kids feel that there is a "second life" for them, then they may just "throw away" their first life if nothing seems to make sense to them from that world.

As someone who exists in the real world for the pupils, then we should try our best to help them make sense of that world and make it seemingly important to them. Our challenge would thus be focused on bringing the real and vritual world together for the pupils so as to make English langauge and teaching more meaningful for them. The use of ICT would thus be the platform for teachers to achieve this objective.

How do we do it? By recognising the multitude of roles that we must play in an ICT language classroom and more importantly, to understand why ICT is important in language learning in today's context. Equally important would be to acknowledge the strengths and expertise of pupils in ICT and to work with them and tap on their expertise for the benefit of all.

CALL in the 21st Century

It is very interesting to note how the role of technology has changed in a language classroom since it evolves in the 1960s. The change in its role is aligned to the change in views on the teaching of the English language. Currently, language is viewed as socio-cognitive and the purpose of it is for social interaction. Thus the focus is on content-based language teaching. The advancement in technology has allowed us to move from learning 'from it' to 'with it' and now 'in it'.

Yes, 'in it'. This is especially important when the availability of internet has allowed learning to take place anywhere in the world and opportunities are abundant for pupils to engage in authentic discourse.

But how then do we exactly move from the 'with it' to the 'in it'?

The NET Generation - what does it mean?

At one glance, I thought the NET generation represents solely a generation born in the era of advanced technology and that's that! It never crossed my mind that being a Net-Gen kid also means having a set of qualities which are totally different from kids in the previous generation. It just dawned upon me how important it is for us, as teachers, to know what these qualities are. By knowing and understanding, we would be able to tailor our language teaching to suit the pupils' needs and interests. By knowing what drives these pupils, we are able to bridge the gap in their learning by providing them wisdom in what we know and harnessing their skills and potential by transferring them into academic purposes.

Silver bullet - yes? No!

Of course, ICT is not a silver bullet...it is not going to solve all the problems that we, as teachers, face in the teaching of language learning. As it is, the use of ICT has produced pupils who are addicted to gaming, the invasion of privacy, infringement of copyrights, etc. Yes, it is a tool that can be used to enhance language learning but when used wrongly, it can also have detrimental effects on users. Teachers must play an active role in faciliating these ICT sessions in the classroom and pupils must have enough guidance in becoming a critical user.

Overteaching - are we not?

Definitely as teachers, we do not want to overteach our pupils as this would not help them in surviving in a globalised world in the future; where changes are inevitable and technology, moving at a faster rate than we can ever use them. However, I stil do believe that we need to teach our pupils to be competent in the English Language before they can use ICT to harness their expertise in that language. You see, the pupils whom I teach are not native speakers of the language. I strongly feel that I need to teach them the basic rule of grammar and the language features so as to make them competent in speaking, reading and writing standard English. Only then, will they be able to communicate with people of other communities and know how to 'switch' between various registers when communicating using the ICT tools. They must have the literacy skills before commincating with others through ICT. ICT is a useful tool in enhancing the teaching of language in the classroom as it motivates and engages the pupils. It also allows the communication and exchange of ideas and the opportunity to work collaboratively with others.

So, are we overteaching then? As teachers, we always want to impart all that we know to the pupils as we do not want them to be short-changed. How do we know that our pupils have achieved the Standard English required then? When do we say that our pupils are an expert in the language? Unfortunately, more often than not, the examination scores are used as a standard measure of their expertise in the language. This could inevitably put the pressure on teachers to overteach. Perhaps, we need to use our own discretion and judgement, to be able to say that our pupils are ready to take the learning of their language to the next level and ICT would be an effective tool to enhance their learning.

We must first believe that technology is a tool that gives us the empowerment; that when use it the right way, it would enable us to reap more benefits than loss.

And of course, with the use of ICT in classroom, teachers would have to look into areas such as protection of intellectual property, the use of search engines, cyberwellness, etc. Most importantly, teachers have to teach pupils to be critical users of ICT and not to use it blindly. So, the teaching cycle continues...only in a different direction.

My thoughts...

So, what strikes me most about today's discussion is really about the use of language and communication in this Digital aAge. You see, I've always thought that using ICT in the teaching of language is about achieving your lesson objectives in a language classroom. So, I thought we should be using ICT as a tool to engage pupils in their learning of grammar, text type and etc.

Well, I was wrong! ICT is really about using it as a tool to provide opportunities for pupils to communicate with one another and learn more about each other's knowledge. It is about teaching the pupils the skills to communicate with others so that they are able to know who to approach for the information that they need. One point that really stood out is the fact that, we, teachers are no longer the people with the authoritative knowledge. Knowledge in this Digital Age is distributed everywhere. It is not centralised in any location. Instead, pupils should be taught on where the required information is located and how to retrieve that information.

With that in mind, I do agree that ICT tools are able to provide us with the authentic environment in a language classroom. By giving pupils authentic tasks to complete, we are giving them opportunities to engage in various ICT resources available. We are enabling the pupils to 'survive' in the Digital Age by teaching them the skills to 'connect' with the Distributive Knowledge rather than keep on reiterating and believing that teachers are the Authoritative source of knowledge.

Then, that brings me to the next important question - as teachers, are we ready to embrace this new era or are we simply just overteaching at this point in time?

And so, the next question is...

why should I then use ICT in a language classroom???

Last year, I went for an ICT workshop where the Mathematic lesson uses the MS Excel to teach the pupils on bar and pie graphs. It could be easily seen how that lesson would be engaging for the pupils as the use of Excel allows the pupils to visualise changes in the graphs when changes are made to the input data. Pupils learn how to communicate their results and data via graphical representations.

How about a language classroom then? How could ICT help? Language is a form of communication. Thus, anyone who uses IT as a form of communication would need to use the language. ICT could then serve as an authentic resource in the classroom in which pupils learn how language is used in the real world. At the same time, it also allows them to practise using the language in real life contexts.

Where am I now?

ICT...Information Communication Technology, well, at least I think that is what it means. It used to be simply called IT - Information Technology, so why the change? Probably because in this era, the use of IT does not merely represent the use of technological tools alone. Through its advancement, IT can now be used as a platform of communication worldwide.

When I first joined the profession 8 years ago, we are trained to be IT savvy so that we can conduct lessons using the various Microsoft Office tools such as Powerpoint, Word and Excel. The objective is to make lessons more engaging for the pupils especially through the animated pictures and sounds. No problems with that!

But now, that is not enough! Computers have become a part of the pupils' lives and the World Wide Web is just a click away. It is not uncommon for pupils to communicate their thoughts, find out information, gain knowledge and keeping in touch via the net and other technological tools.

Thus, I believe that ICT could be an important teaching resource and tool which I could probably tap on in order to engage my pupils effectively in schools. The challenge would then be, to create ICT lessons which are effective in engaging the pupils and at the same time achieving the objectives of my lessons. And that is something I think I really need to work hard on!

I Did It!!

Hi, hi!...This is actually my 2nd time writing in my first blog entry...you see, my entry got lost while I was trying to save it....*sigh* This is what happens when one is trying to navigate through new technological advancement....hehe..

Anyway, as I was saying I didn't know that creating a blog is that simple, well at least the first step to creating it. Navigating though, takes a hell lot of a time.

As my title suggest, this blog is created simply because it is the first task assigned to me for my Masters module on the use of ICT in a Language classroom. Through this blog, I am required to reflect on my learning and exchange ideas with anyone who is interested in this particular topic. So, if you readers out there are interested to hear what I have to say, to agree or disagree, please give me your two cents worth cos' it's definitely worth a million to me :)