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New technology in the classroom I would like to write this article about new technologies that can be used in the classroom. One of the new hypes in teaching are interactive whiteboards. Although these interactive whiteboards are expensive, they find their way more and more into the classrooms. One of the big advantages is that all the work done on the whiteboard can be saved. Also you can prepare the things that you want to put on the blackboard. There are several different types of interactive screens. I have chosen 4 of them:
? Smart boards: these are touch screens. You can write on them with digital ink. You control the screen and the different applications simply by touching it.
? E-beam: this is, in combination with a laptop and a beamer, a portable solution. To control it you need a special digital pen.
? Focus boards: this is a digital board with electromagnetic technology. You need a special pen to control it. The electromagnetic field reads where the pen touches the screen.
? Star boards: this digital board works with optical sensors that are fixated at the top of the whiteboard. These sensors read the board until they see the reflection tape at the end of the board. There is no specific tool needed to control the board.
Another new technology that is finding its way to the classrooms is the tablet. In turkey the government recently decided to distribute 15 million tablets to Turkish school children over the next 4 years in the FAITH project. They should use the tablets mostly as e-readers so they don?t need to take a lot of books to school, but this isn?t the only way that they can use the tablets. They will also be able to send homework to their teachers by email or look up information on the internet. For the moment programmers in turkey work hard to develop new applets that can be used in the classroom. Although I can see the advantages of using tablets, I also find some disadvantages:
? Tablets are hard to protect against installation of new software so there is a chance that the students put games on there.
? The interaction between students and teacher will decrease.
? For teachers it will be hard to check and see if the students are at work or are busy playing games.
In some schools teachers don?t even have cassette-players and cd-players. Here a mp3 player can provide a solution. These days most people have an mp3-player and mp3-players are becoming very inexpensive. You can already find a cheap mp3-player for 25$. If you add to this a cheap set of speakers you have a low budget sound system. With windows media player you can simply rip a cd and put it on your mp3-player. Or you can download the sound of ?You Tube?-movies with ?YouTubeDownloader?. This way you can provide to your students authentic speech or model dialogues even if you work in a school with a low budget.
Every day new technologies come to our disposal and it is up to us to choose whether or not we use these technologies in our classrooms. When using new technologies we always need to see if it is useful to add these technologies to our lessons. Does the use of the technology help our students to better and faster learn English? It is important to not overuse these technologies and not to forget our core business: teaching.
