How important is to integrate internet in the classroom?

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Rate: 5

My initial impression for this article was “another reading regarding CALL” but when I started reading it my mind was changed. Something that I learned from this article and every teacher should know was the use of internet as a personal tutor for students or teachers. Nowadays, the internet has become a fundamental element for almost everybody and teachers are not the exception. So here I show you how important it is.

A belief of mine that was confirmed was the internet for advice and analysis. For Advice: maybe you, once in your life as an English-learner, have misunderstood an English topic such as the use of restrictive Clauses and Nonrestrictive Clauses. For such reason, internet can help you to discover unlimited resources to understand easily any topic and use them as a guide.

Here I left one link which is a perfect example of these resources.

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl

For analysis: to have a better understanding of English words, there are also many websites which provide you the meaning of any word you want to know and also the context it is used. Here I left you a sample website. You just enter a word and you find many ways to use it.

http://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/

For Activities: internet can provides teachers a great amount of websites with interesting examples and tasks that can motivate students to continue practicing while playing. Freerice.com is a page that gives a word and some other for you to guess the meaning. If you win, you will be helping to feed poor people.

What surprised me in this article was the use of the internet as a tool to foster creativity and communication. What really bother students is to have homework assignments without a specific purpose for them. However, internet seems to be the solution. Some websites such as http://www.drawastickman.com/ or http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/ provide an interactive platform. The http://www.drawastickman.com contains a series of interactive mini games that ask the user to follow some commands like draw a tiger costumer around me. And the second one allows you to create your own comic by adding pictures with movement and text. They both challenge students to continue with the task until it is done. This are tools that teachers can use in their classes to change it a bit. Also for communication, we have http://alice.pandorabots.com/ which is a program that allows the user to communicate with it by receiving answers of any question you have asked at the moment. That chat can be used for teacher to see in which area their students are failing.

Something that made me want to read more about was selecting an. For selection content, what is pretty important to know is what kind of content to show students. We cannot only take an article to make an activity in the classroom. We have to consider whether to use authentic or semi-authentic material and its usability.