Let’s integrate technology in the lessons, you can do it!

If we think about novel teachers and older ones who have been working for many years, it is highly noticeable the existential gap between them in terms of implementing technology in their lessons. We can observe that teachers who have recently graduated consider technology as an essential tool for teaching while most of them who have had long service in teaching reject the idea of incorporating technology to enhance their lessons. Hence, this wide difference between novice and experienced teachers is an issue that concerns us all.

  

As we all know, students of this century are constantly keeping in touch with the Internet world and thus, they always have a modern device at hand and rely a lot on it. Therefore, we, as future teachers, consider it essential to think about our students' interests and preferences. In view of this, we propose what Dr. Ruben Puentedura (2006) developed as SAMR (henceforth Substitution-Augmentation-Modification-Redefinition) a model of technology integration in the educational processes. This method assists teachers in a more effective way by integrating technology into teaching and learning, and moves through successive levels that lead to higher order thinking. This sequence is illustrated in the image of the stair above. In this way, this modern framework allows teachers to enhance and transform their traditional way of teaching (Morgan, 2015). For instance, teachers might well substitute a sheet of paper for using a word processor as a typewriter. So, students will have the opportunity to write using a spellchecker, cut and paste whatever they want. Moreover, the learning process might become more effective and engaging as images can be added, a text might be hyperlinked and the text itself can be changed quickly. Furthermore, technology transforms learning activities. For example, teachers might ask students to create a blog in which they will share their work with a worldwide audience. That way, the blog is intended for students to be more responsible for the work they present, so they will tend to spend more time editing and refining their written work. Thus, both student learning and literacy might well improve. Teachers might suggest sharing students' works using Google Drive, which is a free cloud-based storage service that enables users to store and access files online. By doing this, students might share their works with others apart from their teacher and receive feedback from various people. In addition to this, the use of Google Docs allows students to exchange information and collaborate on a shared assignment. In this sense, this facilitates learning opportunities that would be impossible without such technology. Therefore, SAMR helps teachers to improve their English lessons by incorporating technology in a considerable way, that is to say, making a modification that leads to a real transformation.

Taking into account our teaching experiences, we can affirm that incorporating technology in the lessons not only catches the students' attention, but also enables them to learn significantly (if it is well integrated). In our lessons, we decided to implement an interesting application called “Kahoot” which is a perfect tool to create discussions, quizzes or surveys on specific topics either for assessment or for feedback. This game-based pedagogy is easy to use and made our lesson definitely more engaging. Thus, we designed our own task by using this app that students had to download to their mobile phones. In this particular case, we want to highlight that we could notice how much the students enjoyed the task at the same time they were learning. It is really important for us since one of our main aims is to provide meaningful activities that might well involve students in the lessons. Besides our group of students were always reluctant to participate and too boisterous, and this application allowed us to encourage a lot of students’ participation.

If you want to know more about “Kahoot”, have a look at the following video.

All in all, we strongly believe that especially experienced teachers must be aware of the great impact that integrating technology has on the lessons due to the fact that we live in a technological era and work with students who love and are very interested in the technological world. Consequently, we recommend integrating technology having in mind SAMR in order for teachers to make remarkable improvements and transformations in their lessons. Besides, we think that teachers must think critically about their students and consider students’ interests and realities when planning the lessons. So, why not integrating technology into the lessons? Let’s go, it is easy and we are sure you will love it as much as your students will… You can do it!

REFERENCES

Morgan, D. (2015). “Integrating Technology: Introduction to SAMR Model”. Retrieved from https://uen.instructure.com/courses/400245/pages/integrating-technology-introduction-to-samr-model?module_item_id=3528660