The Token Technology Activity

I am teaching Spanish for Heritage Speakers this semester and our textbook brags about incorporating a ton of technology-based activities, which is great, since we're lucky enough to have class one day per week in the same computer lab where our ITL2TL class is held.

However, the more I get to know the textbook, the more I realize that the alleged 'technology based activities' are usually called " [insert cultural topic of the unit] en el ciberespacio" (ciberespacio = cyberspace) and the instructions can be summarized as follows: "type [insert cultural topic] into your favorite browser & see what comes up." To give a more concrete example, the students essentially Google things like 'chicano identity' and 'pachuco culture.' Experience (at least with my current group of students) has shown that this is pretty ineffective unless I add my own structure or spin.

I feel like a lot of textbooks just want to say they have a technology component but don't make any effort to address the fact that just googling something is ok, but it's not going to be very productive for the student if he/she doesn't have any kind of framework with which to analyze, organize, or filter the search results. In addition, as we all know, fake or inaccurate information abounds on the Internet, and as we've discussed in class, many of the students lack enough Internet literacy to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to websites.

The Internet is SUCH a powerful tool, and I'm all for the students discovering information on their own and helping to create their own course content, but just as you wouldn't pose a question like "what is chicano identity" to a beginning level language students without breaking it down into smaller units (because it's too open ended and not structured enough), we shouldn't be telling students to 'find information on the Internet' and leave it at that.

Have you guys had similar experiences teaching? Do you have any suggestions about making a structured, manageable activity that involves Internet search?

Are YOU a digital native?

In the Thorne & Payne article they say the term digital native: "includes people born during or after the mid 1980s and who are socialized in the use of the Internet from early ages" (p. 379)

I was born in 1984, raised in the Midwestern United States and started using the internet in about middle school. I consider myself a very competent user of basic computer & internet functions as well as cell phones, but I think I am on the tail end of the "digital immigrant" generations because I wasn't surrounded by computers from birth, didn't start texting until late college/early grad school, and in some ways can't identify with my current students who don't seem to know or remember a life that doesn't include a Blackberry or iPhone.

I want to know if YOU consider yourself a digital native and why or why not. What is the salient factor? Age? Can you behave as a near-digital-native if you were born before the 1980s? Does it depend on what country you grew up in? Your socioeconomic status? Education level?

Internet Tech in the Real Classroom

From this course, besides a better understanding of what is available to teachers when it comes to Internet technology, I hope to gain lots of practical strategies that I can incorporate into my own teaching to improve my students' language learning experience, and I also hope to learn ways to effectively use technology so it makes my life as an instructor less complicated (or at least not more complicated), though I realize there is often an initial learning curve.

I think Internet tech has the ability to make language courses much more interactive and might give every single student the opportunity to participate more that he/she might in a traditional classroom. However, to be honest, every time I try to incorporate technology into my class it ends up being an enormous amount of work for me---much more than I expect. The preparation, anticipating possible tech failures and planning for them, training myself, training students, dealing with connection/compatibility/input issues...

I know that in a lot of our courses we study ways to make classrooms better, but sometimes I feel like we're assuming this ideal kind of classroom situation, which is only helpful to a certain point. I hope in this class we can stay innovative and forward-thinking while keeping one eye on the reality of most teachers who definitely want to do what's best for their students but who really can't handle much more work than they already have. I'm really excited to see what's out there!! :)