Why don't teachers use technology more?
Still in its box: the inactive whiteboard (sic)How much does the technology get used here, in this school? The question came up in the CELTA session we had Tuesday last week. I suggested that it (classroom computers, interactive whiteboards, a computer room with 15 PCs, video camera, digital camera...) is underused and someone asked "Why?"
For many reasons, I would suggest, most likely a combination of some or all of the following:
- Doubt whether or not using technology will actually lead to language learning
- Lack of ICT training
- Technophobia
- Unwillingness to try something new, to see if it works
- Fear that it might not work if they took it into the classroom, that something might go wrong with the technology
- Not actually having a computer in their own classroom (and therefore having to arrange to move to another)
The other reasons in the above list, which I fully understand and sympathise with are, I would suggest, things that as teachers we need somehow to overcome...
Labels: CELTA sessions
4 Comments:
All real reasons, for sure. The other one, and my main one, is fearing or knowing that it will simply take more time to prepare to achieve basically what you could do without it
Yes, definitely another reason, Alex.
For that reason, I'd always advise (1) going for simple projects -- and ones in which (2) as far as possible it's the learners (not the teacher) who is using the technology.
The last is the biggest barrier at the university where I work here in Argentina where none of the classrooms have a PC and where we cannot be sure all our students have access to a computer at all.
Which is obviously going to make it hard to use a lot of technology, Reina...
However, I think often it's a question of looking at what you do have available and exploiting that; too often I see teachers not using any technology because they don't have exactly the technology that they would like to have in an ideal world.
If there is little or no technology available in school, your students don't have it at home, but you do, you can still use technology for your own personal development and for finding (non-technological) ideas and materials to use in class...
And if you don't have a PC in your classroom, or a computer lab to go to, but your learners do have camera-equipped mobile phones, or digital cameras -- or even if you've only got one digital camera -- then that's your technology and you want to be thinking about how you could use that...
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