Past memories, I still remember that I taught by using chalk and white/blackboard when I was senior high school. My teacher always use textbook or Student’s Worksheet Paper to check our ability in English.
Now, when I am studying English in this faculty, my friends and I are toward for teaching with technology. I assume that teaching with technology is a good idea for learning. But I can’t separate it with textbook or white/blackboard. Using textbook is good, while technology can develop our skill to teach the students.
One idea that comes to my mind is about student’s enthusiastic and their interest to study English using technology. Some teachers are usually use the same way year to year, while others improve their teaching with technology. We, as a teacher should improve it. Students who taught by the same way will get bored. They lose enthusiatic when study, because their teacher don’t make something new for them. They just follow, read, and do exercise.
But when teacher using technology, it means that teacher are capable to handle the class more competence than other teacher who are using the same way year to year. Students are enjoy to come to the class, they pay attention to what the teacher said, and they can share any idea to their teacher about technology. Students can assume that we are good in technology, and they appreciate it.
When we do this, we have to consider some positive and negative impacts, they are:
Positive Impact
1. Surf the internet, like wikis, blogs, YouTube.com, or other resources every time we want. We can download material as could as possible. Of course, the media is different, because we use computer when teaching. Something new is loved.
2. Internet provides benefit for learning, without go around and sit in front of computer, we know everything. Automatically, our knowledge was improved.
3. Technology should suitable for any subject. English skills should be match to the technology. Text or video are conduct to the speaking skill. It happened in Senior High School 1 Jambi. Their exercise is making English video, which introduce their class member one by one. They act like actress and actor too.
4. ‘It’s not what it is, it’s what you do with it.’ (Jones 1986.) So it is not the interactive whiteboard which could improve the learning experience, but how it is used.
5. Think about is the relevance of what he/she is teaching and then choose the best approach to do so, by using technology or not. Many zero-resource classes can be as effective as a high-tech class. Technology is supposed to add value to your class, not distract the student from the real purpose of the class.
Negative Impact
1. The students who love the classroom do not contribute to the knowledge-building on the forums, because they use technology to study.
2. We know that we should test the ability of student. In general, we test in old way, but when using technology, testing is not the same with old way testing. We sometimes can’t predict whether student can approve the new testing or not. Is it match?
3. The effectiveness using technology when teaching sometimes unsuitable. Some teacher less competence to use it, but others are easy. Example we can match the opening of teaching balance with teaching time, explain the benefit of technology, and face the enthusiastic student within their answer.
4. Technology sometimes make student bored. We can change the way of teaching to make it balance.
Last but not least, technology can’t separate with our life. We have to use it as improve our teaching. It is better to use it, but don’t always use it. We can make it balance, right? Choose the best teaching way to make student happy and motivated to study.
Bella Moulina 