Students and Technology

It has become clear throughout our course, and especially through the "Students" readings that the best way to reach my students is through technology.

Before this class I didn't think that technology necessarily needed to play a huge role in an SLA classroom. I equate this to the fact that my main concern has always been making sure that students participate in class, and I thought of technology as being counterproductive. In my eyes, technology is used to make tasks easier, and to cut corners, which would mean losing valuable hands-on experiences.

I've come to realize that this is not the case.

As shown in Revisualizing Composition and Generations Online in 2010, the students I teach are of a generation that is very comfortable with technology. Now yes, there are certain technological means that these students can employ to cut corners, but this does not apply to all.

I've learned that I need to take advantage of how comfortable my students are with technology. Comfort, actually, is something that I've been talking about since Day 1 of our class; that it's one of the most important things in an SLA classroom so that students are willing to be open and share their thoughts. If they aren't comfortable in the classroom environment they won't want to participate, and not participating means only learning the language one-dimensionally.

So let's take the idea of comfort and run with it. I think I was on the right track saying that when the students are comfortable they will be more willing to open up and try to use the language, and that applies to technology also. My students will probably be much more comfortable using the language if they're being asked to post to a blog or to a Facebook group than if they were being asked to type up and print out paragraphs to turn in as homework.

Using technology such as Facebook or blogs eliminates the taboo of writing. Luckily for me, SLA writing at the levels I teach never needs to be super formal. However, as I mentioned, if I were to assign a short paragraph writing assignment as homework with instructions to print it out and turn it in, it would be hard for that assignment to not feel formal, and for my students to not feel pressure writing it. They would be critiquing every word they wrote, second-guessing their knowledge of the language and that is not what I want at all; it is not beneficial nor even possible for them to write formally and accurately at their level.

Using technology would be more casual, less stressful, and would allow them to be more open and free with their use of the language since it is through a casual medium that they are comfortable with, and already use in everyday life.

Also, thinking back to the chart in Generations Online in 2010, plenty of the categories of activities in which 50% or more of people ages 18-33 engage in could be transformed into SLA lessons:
At least 80% engage in watching videos? Well that tells me that I should assign them to find videos in Spanish and to share with the class. The gears in my head are turning now: assign a few students each weekend to find a video and post it to the blog, and then we can discuss them on Monday mornings.
70% get their news? Again, gears are turning. Assign students to find a news article from elpais.com or another Spanish news source and summarize it on the class blog.

My eyes have been opened. My students have no idea what I have in store for them this coming semester. Technology is definitely not going to hinder their exposure to the language, but rather open all kinds of new doors.