Nowadays,
using technologies in the language teaching process has become a trend among
teachers and students. With the development of the wire-less technology,
youngsters have spent more time on their cell phones every day. They could meet
friends, find restaurants and even book film tickets in a few minutes. In school,
the digital resources are popular in class for their convenience of transfer. More
and more students also prefer to read PDF files on their tablet.
In
my mind, compared with the other study fields, learning a language is more
likely to be learning a skill, but not knowledge, so, using language with
higher frequency will help students to handle it faster. The combination of
language learning and internet technology will be more attractive than the
traditional teaching way for the young students. They might also pay more time on it. I
intend to be a Chinese or English language teacher in the future. According to
the National Standards for Foreign Language Education, it emphasized the
importance of language skills learning and the importance of learning the
culture background of the target language was also mentioned. But in the traditional teaching process, the time limitation of the class lessens the learners’ time of
exposure to the target language.
From
the Will Richard’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcast
and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, in its first three chapters,
the importance of using weblog are described in details. In recent years, there
was a boom is the amount of Weibo’s user both by using cell phones and personal
computers. Weibo, in fact, is a kind of weblog with a limitation of 140 Chinese
characters (similar with Twitter). With more functions in smartphones, people
can also share their pictures, voices, the music they like, even the video or
the game they like. Almost every cell phone user has registered in Weibo. I
noticed that in Weibo world, not only the people, but also some organizations or
companies also opened accounts to share some professional knowledge for their
followers. With these functions, I think that a language teacher can also build
a connection with his or her students by using Weibo. Teachers can give
notifications, homework and some educational resource by texting a Weibo. Students
will get them instantly and give responses to teacher easily.
Another
technology I would like to use is the Collaborative Space. As mentioned above,
the Weibo helps build the connection between teacher and students, the
Collaborative Space will provide a place for students to help each other. From
a language learners’ perspective, the discussions with peers are always have
great efficiencies in understanding. The combination of the use of these two internet
tools might provide a new way to help the students in language learning.
