STEP 4 TECHNOLOGY IN TEFL

1.      . INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING.

STUDENT:

MORELIA PULIDO SOLER

Our goal as educators cannot be limited to the mere training of skilled workers or employees of factories. The only true education must combine art, manual work, science and technology, so as to promote cognitive development, creativity and personal growth. The new literacy, a term used from more than a decade ago (Anderson, 1993) To refer to the new demands of literacy as a result of the integration of ICTS in education, as well as ICT as such, allow educators, perhaps for the first time in history, set a goal as ambitious as the mentioned above.

This awareness has been favored by the advance of modern information and communication technologies. Icts offer a wide range of materials to create new educational systems that allow the exchange and interaction between groups of teachers and students to geographically distant. 29 These materials are flexible and respond to the changing needs of students of all ages.

This study sets out to give a general overview of the availability of technology for foreign language (FL) teaching and learning today, to outline the various uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in this sector, to provide a few, selected studies of best practice, illustrating meaningful deployment of these resources, and to point towards future developments and possible implementation in the coming decade. It highlights the importance and the role of the teacher in ICTrich foreign language learning environment and shows how such environments can contribute to cross-cultural understanding. Methodological implications of the use of the new media in language learning and language teaching are considered, and suggestions are made for the use of the Internet as a forum for exchange between practitioners and researchers

ICTs can expand access to language programmes and improve the quality of teaching and learning in general. The World Wide Web expands the classroom context and provides access to current, up-to-date materials from the country or countries of the target language, offering learners and teachers a plethora of materials in different modes, bringing the foreign culture and language to life and making it more tangible.

The authors of the above-mentioned report list the following benefits of using multimedia environments for teaching and learning: “Multimedia can:

• enhance learning in different locations and institutions of diverse quality;

 • present opportunities to students working at different rates and levels; provide (tirelessly, without holding up other students) repetition when repetition is warranted to reinforce skills and learning; and

• compensate, in the short term, for high student populations and limited numbers of trained and experienced teachers – in combination with robust teacher development initiatives and improvements in teachers’ working conditions. Updates to contentware can ensure that teachers and students encounter and have the chance to work with current and authentic sources. Such encounters tie learning to the most important events of our time and underscore the general idea that knowledge itself is not fixed and finalised, that there is a universe of discoveries and a library of analyses that can be available to students.”

In order to orchestrate successful learning scenarios, teachers need to learn how to put together tasks and materials to guide their learners to successful execution and conclusion of their projects. Unlike work with conventional teaching materials (textbook, workbook, audio and video materials), which have been graded, pre-assembled and collated in a chronological order, the design of learning scenarios nowadays is much more complex, requiring higher order skills involving researching and evaluating source materials, setting overall aims and objectives, and breaking down tasks into meaningful and manageable sequences.

2.      SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND PARTICIPATORY LEARNING.

STUDENT:

DIANA CAROLINA GARCIA

In the current panorama of technological and social change, important transformations are taking place. We refer to contemporary times as the "information age" or "knowledge" characterized by the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the growing demand for new educational approaches and pedagogies that promote learning throughout In the field of higher education, there are changes in the latter's views, with an increasing emphasis on the need to allow and support not only the acquisition of knowledge and information, but also to develop the skills And the resources needed for technological change and to continue to learn throughout life

At the same time, there are important social trends at work, such as the diversification of example trajectories, multiple career paths, re-qualification and flexible work schedules that are drivers of. In a digital world of this type, with high connectivity and ubiquitous learning, it is necessary to expand our vision of pedagogy so that students are participants, Co-producers rather than passive content consumers, and so that learning is a process that supports The goals and needs of personal life.

There are multiple interpretations of the term "Web 2.0", we define it broadly as a second generation, or more personalized, communicative form of the World Wide Web that emphasizes active participation, connectivity, collaboration and sharing of knowledge and ideas among users.

Public servants are receiving an intense and growing interest in all sectors of the education industry. They are considered to have considerable potential to address students' needs, enhancing their learning experiences through personalization and networking opportunities and collaboration

The term "social software" can be broadly defined as "software that supports group interaction," although it is arguable that the Internet has always been part of a network of individuals connected through social technologies such as e-mail, chat rooms and discussion forums . Current social software tools not only support social interaction, feedback, conversation and networking, but also have Modularity that allows collaborative remixability - a transformational process in which information and organized and shared media By individuals can be recombined and constructed to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.

Educational interactions have been widely available for several years. However, many more educational institutions are discovering that new models of teaching and learning are needed to meet the needs of a new generation of students.

Students today are looking for greater autonomy, connectivity and socioexperiencial learning.

Taking a broad view of affordances - sharing, collaboration, personalization,

Customization, etc. - has given rise to a series of alternative paradigms for learning.

In short, social software allows students to choose in control of their own learning, mediated by a raft of tools, including the voice and direction of the group.

Web 2.0 software like blogs, folksonomies, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, and of course the increasingly popular freely editable wiki, and are providing students with unprecedented learning opportunities. Throughout the world students can use Collective Intelligence to create "the wisdom of crowds", dynamic social environments, instead of studying in solitude through impersonal learning management Designed by administrators.

This work has explored some of the advantages and limitations of social software and defined it as an open architecture that facilitates user-controlled knowledge generated in collaboration and research. It is the combination of the technological advantages of social software, with new agendas and educational priorities, that offers the potential for radical and transformational changes, teaching and learning practices, what we refer to in this work is that there are signs of optimism that The new tools will result in more personal, participatory and collaborative learning environments. However, for these goals to come to fruition, it is necessary to plan as well as develop a detailed understanding of the dynamics of Web 2.0 software and social tools and their affordances. The limitations of the medium and the importance of risk management are not ignored.

  SUPPORTING ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERSTHROUGH TECHNOLOGY

STUDENT:

CLAUDIA PATRICIA DIAZ

 The technology is very important in the learning  the second language because allows students to use the tools that to develop of the  skills  for the learning English Language as: The  Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency for understand the English Language and provide to the students the motivation and confidence necessary for participate in the several activities.

     The technology it give  tools as hardware ( interactive whiteboard and Document Cameras) Web based Software( Animoto, Microsoft Movie Maker, and Apple iMovie and Microsoft Photo Story 3.1 and  Social Networking) that  help the student to the understanding of new concepts, vocabulary acquisition, narrate, create written, make videos , record, collaborate with others, participate and to express themselves.

     In conclusion the use of Technology helps English language students to  demonstrate  their knowledge while reduce your level of stress, minimize the time of learning and ensures success in learning the English language.

4.      USING TECHNOLOGY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

STUDENT:

EDWIN ALEXANDER MARTINEZ JIMENEZ

     The application of computer technologies in language instruction provides a student-centred learning environment. It enables course administrators and teachers to vary lesson presentation styles to motivate students of varying interests, provides learning opportunities outside the classroom (hence increasing learner interaction with the language), and is perceived to cater more for individual differences. According to Yaverbaum, Kulkarni and Wood (1997), integrating multimedia into the traditional learning environment not only enriches the styles of presentation, but also has the advantage of increasing language retention.

Network-Based Learning Resources

In addition to this change in physical means derived from TiC, teaching now has new network-based educational resources, which includes both materials and tools of different types.

As far as materials are concerned, their wealth is overwhelming. On the one hand, we find reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, etc. On the other hand, there are many materials prepared for teaching and on supports very varied: interactive exercises, audio and video recordings in different formats, texts, images ... They exist from exercises and questionnaires of all kinds, through texts and comics, to concept maps and cards of vocabulary. Finally, new technologies also make it possible to take advantage the infinite authentic materials available on the network, especially when the level of students is low, offering didactic alternatives to the frequent Transcriptions or adapted exercises. These technological adjustments include, for example, (Robin, 2007, pp. 110-112) the repetitions of the audio, its slowdown, subtitling and automatic translation robots.

Computer tools used for teaching purposes

The blog, also called webblog, is a periodically updated website that chronologically collects articles from one or more authors, first appearing the most recent.

The wiki. It is a collaborative web space, organized through a hypertextual page structure, in which users create, edit, delete and modify the content asynchronously.
Typical uses of wikis in education:

• Classroom communication space.

• Space of collaboration. You can choose to create a general space on a given topic or a resource more focused on a specific aspect, containing materials and resources resulting from the research of the students.

• Space to perform and present tasks.

• Archive of texts in process of elaboration.

• Collaborative authoring. Place for the collaborative creation of books of Textbooks, manuals or monographs, collections of problems or cases.

• Space for group projects.

Skype: Software that allows communication through voice, text and video over the internet. It is used for the practice of the skills of expression and oral interaction: students can communicate orally not only with peers or with the teacher, but with native speakers and students from all over the world.

We can find other tools such as sotfware for mobile devices where it offers the learner possibilities to interact with didactic and practical content, adapted for people of any age through the use of graphs, exercises, voice recordings and translations that allow a better experience of learning a new language.