Digital Technologies and Creating Digital Materials

In this post, I will share my thoughts about exploiting digital technologies in a class and creating digital materials, as we discussed in 8 week’s seminar.

Exploiting digital technologies in education might be a common understanding in many contexts, whether or not there are some restrictions or issues: budges, Internet connection and a lack of digital literacy training. In my context, few schools are acknowledged as ‘a future school’ by the Japanese government. In the future school project, a laptop or tablet is distributed to individual students and they use the device in a class to learn a subject. When I observed an English class in one of the schools before, a group of students have a conversation with people in Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hawaii through Skype and they enjoyed it. I think that exploiting the digital technologies brings various opportunities to a class, which are limited to do before.

However, at the same time, I recognise that this is not feasible in a large school and where the budges and Internet connection are restricted. Probably Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the other way to deal with the issue, but secondary students are not allowed to use or bring their electronic device such as smart phones or tablets in a class. Thus, we, as teachers in Japan, need to think about what kind of digital technologies can be used and how can be exploited to make the class fun.

In the seminar, one of our peers shared an experience using ‘Google Cardboard’ and her smart phone with us. She just put her phone in the cardboard so that each of us could look though the two glass holes to see an image on her phone. What she did was that she put on a street view on Google map, and asked us to give YES-or-NO questions to the person who was watching the view with the cardboard. We, as students, gave questions, such as “Can you see people?” “Are you inside of a building?” “Are you in the beach?” so that the person watching the view answered. During the interaction, we were guessing which country or city the person was in.

I personally liked the idea and activity a lot at the seminar because it was very engaging and fun. As a questioner, I wanted to know where the person was at, so made me feel like I want to ask questions more, which is, I think, a very crucial factor to encourage students to speak up a lot in a class. I want to try the activity with ‘Google cardboard’ in the future teaching.

Creating digital materials

Not only are there various digital materials available in ELT nowadays, but also we can create digital materials by ourselves using Apps on our phones or tablets. For the seminar’s pre-task, our group created a digital comic material with app called Musomic. Basically, we switched the paper-based material created for week 7’s seminar to the digital form. The text was created by one of members in our group and for learning English for business purposes. The reason we chose Musomic was that the app allows us to create our own comic. Within various images, several templates and babbles, you can choose your favourite ones, and also add sounds.

With Musomic, we created two types of comics titled ‘Superemplyee!’ and ‘Superemplyee! -Bubble-Filling -’. We used superhero images for fun and add a business conversation between a boss (a bad-guy-look-character) and an employee (a superhero-look-character). With the materials, students could read through the first comic and after that they could fill in speech bubbles of the employee’s part with their own answer. However, there are some issues with using the app. Once you publish your comic, students can not edit the bubbles when they do the bubble-filling exercise. Thus, a teacher needs to supplement an extra worksheet or think another way to let students do the exercise. Furthermore, students need to download the app to read the teacher-made comic, which is unrealistic where students own device are restricted in a classroom.

Despite the issues above, it would be possible to exploit the app if students do the bubble-filling exercise with a supplemented worksheet outside of a class as homework. Like Musomic, even though there are some practical challenges in integrating digital materials that is not designed for ELT into a classroom, finding a way to exploit the materials is one of our roles to make learning English fun, engaging and effective for students. In order to do so, as teachers, we need to “have a clear rationale for the use of any materials within teaching and learning experiences” before incorporating the digital materials (Kervin and Derewianka, 2011: 350).

The digital materials have various not only positive but also negative potentials in ELT, so we need to consider carefully a rationale, outcomes, objectives, students’ needs and evaluation when we exploit them. I personally hope that the school restriction in my context is eased in using students’ own device so that they may have various opportunities in learning English in a classroom.

Bibliography

Kervin, L. & Derewianka, B. (2011) New technologies to support language learning. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 328-351.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (2): pp. 143-179.