After 18 years in higher education, my teaching adventure continues and on many different paths. With each step I’ve taken over the years as a Spanish language educator to adopt technology tools in my classes I’ve discovered that students need good guides on their trips as online learners and with their educational GPSes. These are exciting times for teaching and learning, but it’s easy to get lost along the way.
The internet, personal computers, and mobile devices have changed how we interact with information and people. Something to remember, however, is that even though the ways in which students and instructors interact are changing, the principles behind good teaching and learning haven’t changed.
Teaching classes for me has always been about how I could tweak the lesson to make it better next time. This has been true for my traditional classroom, technology-enhanced, blended and distance courses. To develop and improve each class, it has been important to not only research and reflect, but to collaborate with colleagues and to listen to students to discover what works best.
Over the years as technology tools became more personalized and mobile, I could bring those into the classroom to enhance the curriculum. Oral exams could be recorded, I could easily edit video footage, and then share it with students so they could hear and see exactly what I was telling them in my feedback. As the internet became less of a place to connect with bits and pieces of information and more a means to actually interact with content and people, students, instead of writing paper-and-pencil or typed compositions, could build their own websites in the target language, publish their work, and share with their peers. Interactive websites started to pop up and authentic texts had embedded links to help students with reading comprehension in “real time” as they were reading.
Fast forward to 2013 and there has been a significant shift from bringing technology into the classroom to now students preferring to take online courses and using technology in their own ways. What has changed for me as an educator is the added need to prepare those students to use the technology that is built into the course they are taking. Learners today may be digital natives, but in mostly to fully online learning environments, they need a bit more guidance to get them started.
Source: Retrieved 22oct13 via Twitter @SuperScot Scot Graden #edchat pic.twitter.com/7Ro6At2s60
