Susanne Pratscher, a myEUROPE teacher from Austria, registered her school with our project in 2000. Since then she has shared many examples of teaching with ICT, especially in the field of teaching foreign languages. This article describes an experience of more 25 years dedicated to teaching. Susanne emphasises that both teachers and students are learners in a world of rapid changes, imposed by the use of ICT.
Nowadays, language teaching aims to enable young people not only to use the foreign language for reading and writing, but mainly for oral communication. Furthermore, our students should also become familiar with the culture of the country whose language they study. Especially in their future business careers, this will enable them to understand the attitudes and meet the expectations of their foreign business partners a lot better.
How can we help them reach this goal in modern language teaching? The implementation of ICT is only one aspect, but a feature which is gaining more and more importance. I have been teaching in notebook classes since 2000, and from my own point of view I can say, that students enjoy working with their notebooks. Of course, the youngsters are often a lot quicker than their teachers in learning how to handle any type of tools and software.
This offers us the chance to learn from our students – and they love it, if they can show us some tricks on the PC! As lifelong learning should be our motto anyway, we can only profit from the technical skills of our students. If we offer our high command of the language to our students we can form a perfect team – and we can all enjoy the lessons.
The use of webquests, vocabulary and grammar exercises, listening and reading comprehension exercises etc., which are available online, offers a perfect chance to the students, to practice their skills again and again (even at home, if they want to do that!). Teachers can become coaches who help and support the weaker students. If we are lucky, some excellent students in a class will also be able to fulfil this function. This covers another aspect of learning: students enjoy it a lot more being instructed by a peer than by a teacher.
Furthermore, all types of online learning objects can contain links which first of all guide the students through the task, and secondly enable them to intensify the study of a subject, if they wish to do so. If we want to carry out a project with a class, the use of the PC helps a lot in the phase of collecting information from the net. Students can work in pairs or small groups, save the information they found in a separate file which is uploaded to a “project folder” on the intranet, and as all students of the class have access to this “project folder”, they can thus easily open each other’s files and find out what their classmates found. Later on, if they have managed to produce some nice-looking and interesting output, they will appreciate it very much and be proud if we publish their project findings on the net.
Of course, we must never forget that oral communication and real-time interaction with people is another very helpful “exercise”, which enables our students to carry out real-life situations. But sometimes this may be difficult, e.g. when students live in remote areas and bad weather conditions do not allow them to go to school for a certain period of time; or when students are seriously ill and have to be hospitalized for a longer period of time. Then an online-chat, a blog, or any type of learning object may help them keep in touch with peers, instructors – and friends worldwide, at any time of the day which is convenient to them.
You are not familiar with how to draft a website, write a blog or prepare and carry out a chat? Don’t worry! Your students will show you! And that makes teaching far more interesting for us. Therefore, I recommend that you try using all types of ICT in your lessons and don’t give up if the first steps are difficult. I guarantee that you will enjoy it on the long run.
