I don't know the first thing about technology

You don't know much about technology...? Nothing at all, in fact?

The bad news is that you need to learn -- first of all because that's just the world is going and secondly because for things like lesson planning and creating materials it's a very useful skill.

The good news, however, is that learning to use technology is remarkably easy -- things like Word and digital cameras and mobile phones and iPods would never have become so popular if that weren't the case.

And remember, you don't have to be an expert -- you only need to become a competent user of whatever it is you are trying to use. I say "competent" -- but I might just as well say "confident", because I think it's really a question of that: knowing enough to be able to do what you want to do efficiently and easily -- and knowing that you know you can.

How do you go about it?
Some kind of formal training -- a course on, say, Word, that is -- will always help, but that's not always an option open to you. If it's not, there is plenty you can do to help yourself -- and most technology is easy enough to teach yourself to a level of "confident competence", as I say.

Some suggestions, in approximate order of most to least helpful:

• First and foremost, use the technology -- it's like language learning, something many people will learn by doing
• Secondly, use it with curiosity. Most people -- even people who are confident, fairly "expert" users, use very few of options computer programs offer them. Be curious -- examine the drop down menus, find out what those icons you never use are, for example. Someone else in the staffroom has a really neat handout? How did they do it?
• Thirdly, find someone that knows. Sure, you can find things out for yourself but the fastest, simplest way to find out is to get someone to show you.
• On the Internet, you've got tons of great stuff which will help. Try searching Google-is-Evil with the name of your program, the word "tutorial", and what you are trying to do [example] -- and look for a result published by a US university (written with people like yourself in mind!)
• On most programs, your F1 short cut key will bring up the "Help" section (or else use "Help", which you probably have as the last item on your menu bar).
• Fairly low down towards the bottom of my list would be buying yourself a book. Many are written by people who may know lots about the technology, but would never have made good teachers!
• Right at the bottom of my list would be buying a book in a series with yellow covers on it entitled "... for Dummies". It's a hugely successful series (I guess lots of people identify with the "Dummies" in the title!), but most of them are exceptionally badly written, in my experience.

In a previous post, you had links to sites that will help you with the technological terms.

And finally, enjoy using technology -- whether it's your digital camera and pictures of your holiday or using the Internet with a class.

Once you start to enjoy it, that's when you start to feel confident...

Muddiest points, 17 March

The following were the "muddiest points" from our session on March 17th.

• "What's the purpose of this blog?" someone asked, a great question, which I've answered in a separate post. (One of the things I like about the muddiest point technique is that it makes the teacher think!)
• "How do you actually create a blog?" is a question the session doesn't allow time for, but which I've answered previously. You have separate tutorials for Blogger and for Zoomblog (two of the big providers of blogging services), and a comparison of the two, to help you determine which might be better
• "Why is Firefox better than Internet Explorer?"
  
• "Webquests" someone else said -- for which you now have a series of useful links

New to technology?
Several people made comments along the lines of "I've almost no experience in information technology and I don't understand anything yet" and "it's all new to me and I need practice". You now have some suggestions on how to cope with that...

What's the purpose of this blog?

"What's the purpose of this blog?" someone noted as their "muddiest point" after the March 17 session.

It has a number of different purposes, including the following:

• It allows me to share things with you -- notably the useful websites in the "links section".
• It gives you an example of a blog
• It is a blog that you can actually use in a number of ways

Favourites and other things
The links on the right are ones that come from my "Favourites" -- websites that I have bookmarked as being interesting and useful. One of the lessons that long experience with the Internet has taught me is "Don't search!": bookmark useful sites, and you won't have to waste time on Google. Bookmark this blog, and you've got a series of useful websites two clicks away.

Most of the links on the right are in fact on the handout from the session; but a blog is more practical for two reasons: (1) you can just come here and click, and not have to labouriously copy the address out and (2) before each session (ie once a month) I check that all the links actually still work.

The blog also allows me to share other things with you -- such as other useful sites that I come across after your session.

An example of a blog
Of the various possible ways in which you can use technology in language teaching (see handout from the session), to my mind a blog is one of the most exciting.

You can use a blog in many ways but, whichever way you use it, a blog fulfills two important criteria:

1. Blogs are not that time-consuming: they have minimum set-up time, take no longer than e-mail to post to, and -- assuming that you are doing a collaborative blog, either with your students or with other teachers -- needn't take up hours of your time writing
2. The return on investment is high: if -- for example -- your blog is a "learner diary", of your experiences in the classroom, and your reflection makes you think and your thinking makes you learn (about teaching, that is)... or if -- to take another example -- it's a class blog which gives a purpose to your learners' writing, motivates them and leads to a sense of belonging to a community... then in those, and many other ways, your time has been well spent

Personally I feel that a lot of technology doesn't fulfill those two criteria for (poorly paid, pressed-for-time) language teachers.

Use this blog
There are various ways in which you can use this blog, one of which is merely coming back to it to find those useful links.

Apart from that, you can participate in it, by commenting on any of the posts. There are a number that I think are interesting which our 90-minute introductory session doesn't allow time for -- for example in the "intro session" category. You comment, I'll reply -- and then we have dialogue, and that can only be good in any classroom.

You can also subscribe to this blog by RSS. "Don't search, have things come to you" is one of the primary lessons 12 hours a day on the Internet has taught me!

Where do you sit or stand in the classroom?

Where do you sit (or stand) in the classroom -- and what difference (if any) does it make?

There's an interesting article on precisely that subject on the wonderful TeachingEnglish.org.uk site. See also the comments (link, below) on the picture above, taken in IH -- and feel free to add your own.

FAQs: The difference between a website and a blog?

Someone asked "What's the difference between a blog and any other website...?"

I came across this explanation on Wikipedia the other day:

How blogs differ from traditional sites
A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows for easy creation of new pages: new data are entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. It allows for easy filtering of content for various presentations: by date, category, author, or other attributes. It allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

I'd suggest that it's the ease of blogging that really distinguishes it, at least from the teacher's point of view, that and the fact that much of the work is automated for you.

A blog requires very little technical knowledge, and creating it (as opposed to actually writing it) takes up very little time -- and the end result looks fairly professional.

You probably don't have the technical knowledge to create a professional looking website -- and certainly don't have the time to create one for your class/es.

Let me recommend Wikipedia -- it's a great alternative to Google-is-Evil...

What can you do with a blog (1)?

We are going to look at six examples of things you could use blogs for.

My first example is this blog itself: I use it with you, my learners.

I have suggested that before you use technology with your learners you should ask yourself:

• How much of my time is it going to take up -- before, during and after class?
• Whether or not that investment will pay off in terms of better (more) learning?

Bearing the above questions in mind, would you want to do something similar with a class of English language learners? Why / why not?

Use the "Comments" link below to write your answer...

What can you do with a blog (2)?

Example 2, a blog which I did with half a dozen people who took CELTA and found themselves teaching young learners.


We no longer keep it updated -- it ran for 10 weeks, as an experiment. In the illustration above, a site I thought their young learners might like to use to build a fish.

Here, we weren't actually using the blog for our learners, but for ourselves -- the teachers -- in the hope that we could learn things by reflecting on our teaching and sharing things of interest to the group.

Questions as before -- would you learn from a similar project, with fellow teachers, and would it be a worthwhile investment of your time....?

What can you do with a blog (3)?

Example 3: This is in fact a blog we do with people learning Spanish in our Spanish Department. We ask them to describe an item that they have in their pockets...


Question as before -- would you want to do something similar with a class of English language learners, why / why not...?

What can you do with a blog (4)?

Example 4 is not in fact a blog -- it's an idea for a blog.

Someone on our trainee support group, teaching "a group of Brazilian teenagers here in the U.S. on a sort of pseudo educational vacation", asked the following question:

"This group is driving me insane! I've never come across a group of less behaved, unmotivated and basically spoiled brats in my life. (... ) most of these kids come from very wealthy families (...) and are generally accustomed to having everything done for them (...) How do you teach someone who not only hasn't a desire to learn but seems to refuse to?!"

My suggestion was:

"Being a total geek, I think I'd go for a geeky technological answer. I'd put them into smallish groups (3s?) and say they have 48 hours to produce the first issue of an online paper (I'm assuming their pseudo educational vacation in NY includes decent Internet access). They'd have to decide on sections, content, headlines, images -- the lot. And then produce it as a blog. Then they've got to produce the next issue 48 hours after that."

Questions as before: would you want to do such a project with your learners, why (not)? And would it work in this particular case, do you think?

What can you do with a blog (5)?

Example 5 isn't a blog either -- again it's an idea for a blog, one that comes from my daughter, who is responsible for the illustration below:

In schools here in Spain, they get kids to write what they call "fichas" for the books they read -- name, author, plot summary, whether or not they would recommend it, etc (as you can see above).

In English language classes, graded readers (abridged, and with limited vocabulary) are used quite extensively, with some schools having class libraries of them.

My idea would be that each student in the class would read several graded readers, and post their "fichas" on a single class blog, which other students could then comment on.

Questions as before...

What can you do with a blog (6)?

Before the Internet, people used pencil and paper...

And finally, Example 6 -- which actually predates blogging, having been done as a class project way back in 1998.

As we were reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, we did a project on Cuba. Basically, that involved each student -- by lottery -- getting a theme (Batista, Che Guevara, Havana, Tourism, the Cuban Missile Crisis...), and then writng "between 250 and 350 words (neither more nor less)" (!) on their subject...

... which we then put together in the booklet form I will show you.

But, now, you could do the same thing with a blog.

Questions, as previously.

Why blog?

Why blog...?

• It's a great way to become more proficient with technology – partly because successfully publishing things on a blog gives your confidence a huge boost
  
  
• It"s a way to share things with other people, and not necessarily with your students. I"ve got blogs, for example, that I share with my kids, and they have one that they share with their grandmother (who sees them only once a year). With your learners, it could be your sharing with them things that you think may be useful – such as sites where they can find interesting listening or reading material, for example
  
  
• If you use it as a personal diary, to record reflections on your teaching, then you are thinking about your teaching; by thinking you learn about teaching, you learn from and about your own teaching. And if you are not learning about teaching, my advice would be to stop!
  
  
• If you use a blog for the purpose of reflection, you can also share it with other teachers – and reflect collectively – so that your blog enables you to share ideas and support each other
  
  
• If you use it with a class, particularly if they author at least some of the content as a team blog, then it gives them not just a purpose for writing but the sensation that they are in control, that they are creating something collectively, something which belongs to them and which they belong to themselves. For group dynamics, and for motivation, that can only be a good thing...