TEFL Stuttgart

I have recently learnt that I belong to the Generation “X”, but since dates are still uncertain, I might even belong to the watershed between Gen X and Gen Y. My teenage years in the 1980s make of me one of those people who are young enough to have helped their parents use the rewind button or to have recorded films or music on behalf of them and to have played videogames, even though on one of those bulky machines plugged in the sitting room TV, now displayed as industrial archeology items. In my early years as a teacher I used the same tape recorders I assisted my teachers to use in class, I have seen them disappear in favour of CD players and I am living another revolution with the advent of e books which allow me to use several different multimedia tools with a touch on my tablet. Yet, I consider myself as lucky because I love technology, as much as I love handling a paper book, smelling its scent and feeling it under my fingertips and I still can’t find reading one on a tablet appealing. The fact is, I was not born a digital user, while my students seem to be classified as Gen Y or Z, or even Millenial and Multitasking. In my opinion this represents an unprecedented challenge for teachers. Now that I am a teacher and have a classroom of students who have never known what it was like to "wait for dial-up" or can have any song instantly play on their Ipod, I feel I have to grow with them in the use of technology and embrace technological advances. I feel it is great receiving students’ homework by email, and I have created blogs and moodle elearning pages which I use now and then during the school year. Yet, although students like these things, I have to make them interesting and clearly connect them with our class activities because, being “millenials”, they see it as homework and are by no means thrilled just because they use a PC. teachers are invited more and more often to upgrade their teaching by including technological devices, publishers advertise books as being state of the arts, ready to use, complete with all the tools students will find appealing and thus making the teacher’s job easier. Despite all their promises, I cannot share their optimism, because there are a number of things to be taken into account that make this perfect high technology picture break into pieces. First of all not all of the students have the same access to technological devices, actually some of them either do not or own out of date supports. Then the cost of technology implies that even within the most updated school buildings not all the classrooms might be equipped in the same way or allow students to use labs, interactive whiteboards, and internet access at the same time. Finally I would like to point out that most of the software that has been recently produced suggests activities that have been long known to teachers and many of them are not more appealing or attractive if seen on a screen, while they risk of being more time taking, or being considered by students themselves as pointless or childish. I think carefully before choosing which activities to use through technological devices: by me the ones which are really suitable are those which have no paper equivalent or would be more boring or expensive to create in a non digital way, for example those which use photos, film clips, or need colours. The best educational uses of computers are those which allow the teacher’s creativity to overcome the classroom boundaries and exploit digital possibility to the most, but the teacher’s expertise should never be put aside.