benefits

= What main benefits, issues and challenges have you been faced with? =

José Antonio
(sent to EduTech SIG list)

The challenges and issues, I guess are the ones I have mentioned above. Sometimes we do have situations when the desirable equipment or accessibility is not available. We work on semester basis and many times we do not continue the projects we started to develop and teachers that get our groups most often do not use ICT in their lessons. So, sometimes it feels a bit lonely. Teachers who use ICT most often can only rely on online communities of practice to talk about their projects. It would be great if institutions as a whole would get involved.

During the PCI

 * Main benefits**


 * language on the Internet is more natural and does not revolve around "classroom/book language"
 * possibilities for global interaction (flat classroom, no walls, epals)
 * possibility to find out about and make use of students' previous knowledge
 * access to a number of tools online for free (like dictionaries, corpora, translation tools)


 * Main issues**

> What is the Art of Teaching with ICTs? Has our role as teachers changed? What other themes would you like to discuss during the event?
 * collaboration is difficult as people do not complete projects for lack of time (challenge for both students, who have a number of competing activities and work; and teachers, who are given too many groups to teach)
 * lack of facilitation and technical skills - lack of familiarity with different tools which may help in the process.
 * in high schools and in the public sector there are not enough opportunities to practice using the tools, no continued professional development in this particular area.
 * switching from a teacher-centered to a learner- centered approach (many teachers/institutions bring all the material to the students, who just consume it)
 * Main challenges**
 * assessment in distributed online learning environments (institutional assessment is still based on tests given in class on specific book content)
 * how to find, filter and evaluate authentic material and appropriate tools (separate wheat from chaff)
 * make technology a part of your everyday class and not a break from it
 * focus on pedagogy (language learning process) and not technology (tools)
 * do not take it for granted that your stds enjoy technology
 * time issues : adopting new technologies takes time, involves more work and more correction.
 * discipline problems