The Challenges and Affordances of
Technology in the World Language Curriculum
The affordances of technology or, put another way, what we can do with
these technology tools to enhance our students’ language-learning, are numerous
and exciting. This past winter, as I read about different tools, I found myself
repeating, “This is phenomenal, I want to try this.” Then I would visualize how
I might incorporate these same tools into my classroom and, again and again, I
bumped into the same challenge: time. In this post, I will discuss what I feel
are the most important affordances of technology, delineate how time would create
challenges for implementing the corresponding technology, and hopefully come up
with some ideas for working around those challenges.
To begin, technology allows the students to have a voice. For
example in Digital Storytelling, students can narrate a story of something that
is meaningful for them and/or relates to their own experiences and interests. From a skills standpoint, as Polina
Vinogradova describes during her own Digital Storytelling experience, this type of project allows the students to “focus
on what [they] could do rather than on what was limiting [them].” She adds that a digital storytelling
assignment brings
students’ interests and backgrounds
into the pedagogical process; [gives] voice to [L2] learners and [gives]
flexibility in finding forms of expression; [engages] the students in
meaning-making that is relevant to them; and [encourages] them to use [L2]
skills for meaningful communication.1
Students can either have an
individual voice, or they can work together to create a collaborative one, for
examples, with different projects on wikis.
Projects such as Jorge Guillem’s story wiki, which can be found at http://span1020cu.wikispaces.com/El+cuento,
highlight how students write, give each other feedback, and collaborate to
create a creative and modern fairy tale.
Or, to put it another way, Lina Lee describes how
a wiki provides a medium for the
writing process that promotes different stages of collaboration and
scaffolding. Learners assist each other in organizing, composing, and revising
content and form (grammar) to ensure high quality production. Scaffolding, therefore, demonstrates
supportive processes that enable learners to solve linguistic problems and
carry out a shared task (Lee, 2008; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976).2
While I haven’t done either of these two particular activities yet, I’ve
done similar projects, such as asking the students to blog about something that
is important to them. They then had to
read each other’s blog posts and leave comments. For me as a teacher, it was tremendously
exciting to see my students combine something they were passionate about along
with their Spanish, and in the process, they learned new vocabulary and
structures that allowed them to effectively discuss these topics that were
important and relevant to them, and by doing so, bringing their own attitudes
and perspectives into the course.
A second affordance of technology is that it allows students to take
ownership of their own learning. Flipped
instruction and, in particular, flipped-mastery learning allows students to
work at their own pace, to ask help and in some cases, to take the initiative
on when they take their assessments. As
Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams say, “our prerecorded videos have created an
environment in which the burden of repetition is placed on the student.” They add, “our organizational guides are road
maps that guide students through the unit of study and provides them with the
appropriate framework and supporting activities to meet each learning objective.”3 When I flipped my own class, I was
able to see the students take the initiative with regard to their
learning. My students took fantastic
notes (I told them that was an important part of the assignment and that I
would check their notes), and as a result, for the most part, they had a very
good understanding of the structures when they walked into class the next
day. Then, during class, I simply
wandered from group to group answering questions as the students refined their
own understanding of the material. I
found it very exciting to see my role switch from deliverer-of-content to more
of a coach as the students took the initiative with their learning.
The third and last affordance I’d
like to discuss is that technology can bring culture into the classroom in ways
that, before the internet, was simply impossible. There
are so many websites out there, it’s easy to find ones that, as Edgwige Simon
describes, “allow you to introduce or review content directly related to your
learning objectives on the topic that you're teaching right now.”4 I can affirm that this is true. This past trimester, when I discovered
during class that my students didn’t understand what a Spanish tortilla is, I
sent them to YouTube to watch a tutorial of how to make one. After that, the students fully understood what’s
involved and how it’s completely different from a Latin American tortilla. When
studying the different stores (pharmacy, supermarket, bank, shoe store, etc.),
my students can use Google Maps to engage street view, and virtually walk down
the streets in many Spanish-speaking cities.
I feel like I hit the jackpot
during the chapter where the vocabulary is all about health and well-being, and
the country we look at is Bolivia; I found a series of health videos produced
by the Ministerio de Salud de Bolivia.
Though at the time I treated them more like listening-comprehension
exercises, I could easily see making a longer-term project out of them, where
the students compare common health issues in Bolivia to those common here in the United States, and
then write a pamphlet for the students who will be going to Bolivia later on
that year.
As you can see, there are many engaging and exciting language-learning
opportunities afforded by technology, however in each and every case, one needs
time to bring these tools into the classroom in a thoughtful, effective and
meaningful way. If we refer back to Edwige
Simon’s Edutopia article, here are the well-thought-out and logical steps she
suggests for preparing an activity with a web-based resource:
- Build Your Lesson Plan…list the concepts and vocabulary that your students will need for understanding and completing the activity.
- List your learning objectives.
- Design a web-based handout.
- Design a set of collaborative tasks.
- Reserve space for notes.
- Design a final product.
- Have an assessment plan4
Each of these steps makes sound pedagogical
sense, and I would want to incorporate each and every one into a web-based
activity. However, that would also take hours
to prepare, and there are times, when I’m trying to grade other assessments, prepare
my other courses, teach, and fulfil my other duties at a boarding school, when
I simply don’t have hours to spare. For
the most part, the only tech tool that the teacher would be using for this preparation
is a word processor. Other materials,
such as flipped-class videos can take much longer.
So how do we get around the challenge of time? For one, divide and conquer. For example, during our week of flipped
classes, Alison and I showed our videos and activities to each other’s sections. We immediately saw that each of us had
different strengths with the flipped classroom materials, so we divided the
workload later on when we did another flipped lesson. One of us created the video and the other
came up with the activities that the students would do during class, which
divided the workload significantly.
Another opportunity is to use the summer to get work done ahead of
time. This summer, I hope to look over
the curriculum to find the most confusing lessons for my students, re-work the
PowerPoints I use to create the lessons, and record them, so that then I have
the option of either flipping those classes or posting them on the class LMS so
that the students can use them to review, repeating as much as needed.
In summary, it’s been a wonderful experience to learn about the numerous
ways we can use technology to enhance or transform our students’ learning. Technology gives our students a voice,
allows them to take responsibility for their learning, and permits us to bring
culture into the classroom in a real and tangible way for our students. The main challenge is time to prepare the lessons,
materials and assessments, however with a little creativity, I think this is a
challenge we can overcome.
Bibliography
1. Vinogradova, Polina. Digital Stories in a Language
Classroom: Engaging Students through a Meaningful Multimodal Task - The FLTMAG.
(2014, July 01). Retrieved March 16, 2016, from
http://fltmag.com/digital-stories/
2. Lee, L. (2010). Exploring Wiki-Mediated Collaborative
Writing: A Case Study in an Elementary Spanish Course. CALICO Journal, 27(2), 260-276.
3. Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every student in
every class every day. Eugene, Or.: International Society for Technology in
Education. p. 56.
4. Simon, Edwige. Teaching With Web-Based Resources. (2015,
April 28). Retrieved March 16, 2016, from
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teaching-with-web-based-resources-edwige-simon
