Final Reflection: Bridging the Digital and Physical Worlds

The course of New Technologies helped us re-envision our language classrooms of the era of digital world. The shifts that we are experiencing now are having a profound effect on our traditional beliefs about learning, teaching, and schooling in general. While the technology is developing, our kids continue to outpace our own use of these tools. We, educators, need to take the responsibility not only for modeling and teaching the safe, effective, and ethical use of all the Internet has to offer, but also for equipping the students with the new literacies that are quickly defining our world. Due to this course, I had the greatest opportunity to take on this responsibility having gained the necessary knowledge, skills, experience, and confidence, for which I want to express my sincere gratitude to my instructor. Thus, I am ready and it’s high time to complement traditional teaching by implementing new technological tools before they become too recreational tools to be refused being used as pedagogical tools.

Knowing about these tools is not enough for making learning and teaching more effective. It is no less important to know how and why these tools are implemented. I found the educational benefits of blogs, podcasts, wikis, digital storytelling, digital video production, learning management systems, and Google for education really attractive and I am going to use them in my classroom to enable the students to practice the four new dimensions of literacy, to complement learning strategies, to support active learning, which forms the basis of constructivism, to provide anywhere-anytime access, and to foster learner autonomy. We need to be responsive to these innovations to bridge the growing divide between the physical and digital worlds.

                With the help of blogs I will bring my learners from knowledge-based to higher levels of thinking as blogs increase students’ awareness of their language learning process, foster reflective learning and collaboration, reinforce students’ confidence and motivation in learning, and develop learners’ sense of the importance of English. Moreover, the research shows that blogs serve as a new reason to enjoy reading and writing, increase the impact and quality of writing skills, encourage a lot of pre-class reading and post-class reflection, and enable students to recycle vocabulary.  

            Podcasts and podcasting will serve my students as a new source of inspiration, a fresh start to arouse interest in learning and exciting tools to improve listening skills, to provide exposure to native speakers, to add a dimension of immediacy to listening practice, to develop learners’ skills of selecting and evaluating listening materials, to solve the problem of unproductive use of learning time, and to improve speaking skills.

            I will definitely use wikis in my classroom as they can serve as an engaging platform for interactive activities and present course information. They can be ideal for building communities, collaboration, easy participation, valuable content, and evolution over time. Like blogs, wikis provide a new reason for reading and writing, hence a new technique to improve these skills.

With the help of digital storytelling and video production, I will empower my students to create products that are different than just papers and worksheets. Besides, developing technology skills, this creative work can enable the learners to synthesize a number of skills, including researching, assessing, organizing, problem-solving, presenting, and writing their own voice.

My hands-on project gave me a lot of practical experience in using the Moodle, as a learning management system, from the teacher’s perspective. I am going to use this online environment because it fosters active learning where learners are engaged in making meaning, analyzing, investigating, collaborating, sharing, building, and generating. This online space will help me organize the teaching and learning content related to both the traditional and new technological tools.

Regarding the mobile-assisted learning, I may or may not use it at this point, although I know about the twenty uses and benefits of its application. If we could achieve top quality education through open education resources and distance learning, this would establish education as a fundamental human right, would enable lifelong learning and a wave of innovation. I would like to see the results of the experimentation of education analytics which will open a new door to understanding the behavior of learning and assist in improving our own practices.

I am looking forward to the teaching opportunity where I will provide the learners with more flexible ways of supporting learning, using new technological tools in an appropriate way as supplementing approaches to the existing pedagogy.  This course allowed me not only to learn about the above mentioned tools, but also to experience the educational benefits myself and to answer how I can incorporate the best-known principles about teaching and learning using technology as a tool for innovation.