First Blog Entry

Erin Aldrich. I'm a second year MA TESL student on the teaching track and will be graduating this Spring.

Despite having taught ESL for the past few years, I haven't used much technology or computer applications in the classroom. In fact, I have used none beyond Powerpoint for presentations and Word for lesson planning. That's the main reason why I am interested in this class - to learn about all the technologies that I have not yet utilized for teaching. I feel a little embarrassed that I have not taken more of an initiative in catching up with the technological side of teaching, as technology appeals to many students and younger learners seem to expect a high level of technology in their classrooms and lives. I have heard about and had brief introductions to several different language applications, but have never spent more than a few minutes brushing their surfaces.

Therefore, my goals for this class are to get comfortable with actually using computer technologies to help my students learn. I'd like to learn about teaching students through computers as well as improving my own lessons using technology. I would also like to start using corpora and concordance lines in my lesson plans, as well as creating activities in which students use sites like COCA or Words and Phrases to interact with real-world language use and enhance their learning.

As I have so little experience in this field, I do not yet know what kinds of applications I am interested in, beyond corpora sites and software. I am also curious about the usefulness of having students create their own websites and blogs, and the effectiveness of computer-driven learning vs. teacher-driven learning. For now, I'm looking forward to learning the basics of using computer applications in the classroom and knowing which technological resources to turn to in order to best help my students.