Being a teacher is a challenging role as you have the pressure, responsibility and duty to deliver, pass on knowledge in a most efficient way to achieve the desirable results: desirable by learners, the system and you of course.
I have started my teaching path back to 2003 and was way more confident in teaching and selecting material than I’m know. Back then, there was less of political, cultural and religious mess. My first experience was at a primary school where we had to follow the curriculum and the text book we were given, however it wasn’t new or forbidden to supplement and were expected to design cards, posters, occasion plays in order to facilitate the learning process. The pupils were happy and achieved the good results without any internet, iPads, smartboards and other digits and educational sites.
Now we are at the beginning of 2016 and already what was exciting and new last year is already dated. Nowadays learners are blessed with technology, so are teachers. The only issue is to know how to select it, when and what .What material to choose, what are materials?
‘Materials include anything which can be used to facilitate the learning of a language. They can be linguistic, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic, and they can be presented in print, through live performance or display, CD-ROM, DVD or the internet’(Tomlinson, 2001:66).
‘Materials are presented in a paper-based, audio or visual form and exercises built around the text’(Harwood, 2010:3).
And as for the purpose of materials, they can be: informative, instructional, experiential, eliciting, exploratory. For instance today we were given Cuisenaire rods and everyone came up with different activities covering all this purposes.(POST)
In modern classroom students expect to acquire the language in a fun, educational way using modern technology.
There are lots of seminars, blogs about ELT and EdTech. There was interesting suggestion ( An engaged tone: how ELT might handle the ‘EdTech revolution’) for ELT in regards to thriving ‘invasion’ of EdTech: to 1. resist; 2. surrender; or 3. engage.
We always tent to speak about motivating our students, and since we are a ‘screen based generation’ it will be wrong to stick to traditional way of teaching. World is developing rapidly, our lives are getting manic, so why not to use something which can ease both teachers and students lives, makes lessons more productive, vibrant, educational, sociable, experiment as a teacher, try to publish your stuff, try out work of other teachers, learn from each other, get the students to create something.
This summer I had a flavour working with students aged between 16 and 18 years old. I was very lucky to have a smart board and IPads. Students we very happy to get engaged with activities in the class, it made lesson more student centred, they were happy to do the home work. Instead of being wary of EdTech , games and other educational sites, why not to share them with your students and use them at lessons. The only thing is to be selective, plan ahead and don’t get overwhelmed by constant bombarding of internet resources and EdTech
As for the course books, we are safe for the time being. Firstly, because schools use it as money making tool, maybe soon they will be available only in e-version, but they will stick around for quite some time. Secondly they are convenient in order to plan the curriculum, great guide for the newly qualified teachers, cover teachers or great for busy teachers and a physical evidence for students that it’s what they will be learning or will know by the end of the course. Another reason, why use course books are lack of finance, not every school can afford buying all this technology and keep it up to date.
And as for fear of EdTech replacing actual teacher, personally I have doubts about it. Teachers will have to adopt to new changes technology brings , maybe we will teach through playing video games, videos but learners always will want to communicate, they will need your reassurance that they are doing it right, just simply have a conversation.
References:
An engaged tone: how ELT might handle the ‘EdTech revolution’ – See more at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2015/session/engaged-tone-how-elt-might-handle-%E2%80%98edtech-revolution%E2%80%99#sthash.3OHtD0WL.dpuf
Tomlinson, B. (2012) State-of-the-Art Article: Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (2): pp.143-179.
Harwood, N. (2010) Issues in material development and design. In: Harwood, N. English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3-30.