21st Century Skills & Teacher Training Program - Week 4

 Hi to everybody :)    

    The integration of the technology into teaching and learning was the topic of this week. We discussed multiple aspects during the session. Mainly we focused on 'how' while sharing information with each other. We all came to conclusion that technology is a transforming tool in education since it makes the integration, engagement and flexibility possible in teaching and learning activities. Students tend to become more focused and interested while making use of variety of digital tools to learn and practice a new linguistic item. 

    When it comes to the advantages, it is obvious that technology is simplifying many things and it is widely accepted that education is getting simpler to conduct with the help of technology. It allows teaching and learning activities to happen any time any where so it allows the flexibility. It fosters students' interaction and boosts their self confidence to share their opinions via online education portals. Technology gives students the chance to be creative and productive this is another way to say that different than traditional teaching and learning activities, the classroom becomes a student-centred environment rather than a teacher centred one. This is a thing to be appreciated because it is unfortunately very rare to observe such a classroom setting in most of the face to face classroom settings in Turkey. 

    On the other hand we cannot deny the drawbacks of the integration of technology. Yes it saves a lot of time in practice stage but what about the theory stage? Teachers are loaded with immense workload to be able to create new materials by using handful of digital tools. Connectivity is the core element of making use of technology so there is even no need to talk about the integration of technology without connection.

    The significance is to balance. Technology is a way to enhance our teaching and learning activities but students should not be overloaded with too much information while the teachers are trying to integrate technology.

    Besides these, we learnt some new tools to benefit such as: Wordwall, Wordart, Word Clouds and Glogster. All of them are influential and creative tools some of them are pretty practical for visual learners.  

    There are challenges of implementing technology but there are many ways to overcome these challenges as well. 

Bilge Güral xx