Problem or Benefit?

Everything has two sides. First of all, it's the benefit that students all know about technology so students can easily know what teachers want them to do. Moreover, they also can quickly observe as well as approach themselves to teachers' new methods. Secondly, teachers don't need to waste a lot of time explaining new technological terms for them because they are used to these things. The lesson will be interesting and attract more students' attention. However, it's also a disadvangtage if teachers can't prepare themselves with all the technological tools. the way of teaching may become old-fashioned style and students quickly get bored. Therefore, teachers need to up -to-date with the new methods as well as the development of technology in order to make students pay more attention to the lesson  and arouse their love for study. In short, everything has changed so as to keep up with the fast growing society and teachers, methods of teaching are not an exception. Problem or benefit : It all depends on how people face it, solve it and define it.

In the old days when the technology was not popular, students did not have chance to interact with attractive beautiful lessons. They just learnt by heart and try to use their own imaged by themselves to remember the lessons. Nowadays with the development of technology, teachers - especially language teachers can apply the technology in their lessons to make the lessons more attractive and easier to understand. Problem or advantage belongs to teachers’ technology skills. If they don't pay more time in improving technology skills, the lessons easy turn boring and student won’t pay more attention to their lessons. Teacher will be failed in transmit knowledge to students. The youth generation likely knows more about using technological tools than they do so teachers must pay more time in improving their technology skill to help their lessons more attractive. Beside using traditional PowerPoint software for introducing lessons, teachers should explore more technology tools to help students can understand the lesson easily. They can use colorful text in PowerPoint software when they teach English Grammar so that students can identify the structure of sentence for example. To me, if the teacher can use the technology tools as their magic stick to make their lesson more attractive, they will be successful in their teaching.

The world keeps moving and new gadget or apps has been created every day; therefore, using technology in teaching and learning has been an inevitable adjustment. For years, not only the policy makers, teachers, and parents but also the students themselves have weight both the potential benefits of technology in education and its risks and consequences. On one hand, people admit that technology allows everyone to experiment in pedagogy, democratize the classroom and better engage students. On the other hand, some argue that using technology in the classroom can be distracting and even foster cheating. But let put aside those issues just for now and discuss what are the advantages and disadvantages of the fact that this generation of incoming students will most likely know more about using certain technological tools than teachers do.

 

There is the fact that students of new generation are born, raised and grown up with the technology. However, the technology in their eyes is somehow just the cool new thing. Parents let their kids watch YouTube to let them sit still. Kids like social network and consider it as a tool for them to relax. Online games and apps are also used to entertain themselves. Nonetheless, with technology to be applied in teaching, the teacher uses it as a teaching tool and motivate students to use it as a learning tool, and the gap between “Using Technology as a Learning Tool” and “Using Technology as Just the Cool New Thing” is huge.

 

In case the teachers have already used technology wisely and appropriately in both the lesson planning and the classroom environment, but they are still outdated comparing to the better understanding of the technology from the students, teachers need to reconsider. First, teacher should admit themselves that they are not always right and not always know everything. Second, they need more researching, learning and updating to the constantly development of technology in daily life and in teaching. Finally, it is not a bad thing for teacher to learn from their own students, to motivate them to share whatever they know and find interesting about new technology. We learn best when we learn from each other. So, the true ingenuity of the teacher is knowing both how to get the advantages from the technology in order to teach students and to get the students involve and raising their voice to give out their experiences.

 

From my perspective, the concerning issue has both good and bad side effect just based on the ingenuity that the teacher applies to the individual situation. However, the truth is that the world keeps changing, the technology will excrete itself and so do teachers if they won’t adopt, adapt and improve.

 

P/s: From my teaching experience, there is another concern that what happen if the students at some public University - who mostly come from the countryside – do not have access to any kind of technology before they go to university. They do not even have a smartphone or laptop to help their learning. Another issue is that, not all the schools are equipped with the modern facilities. They do not even have a projector. So, what do you think about those raising problems and how do you deal with that? I have my solutions but I’d love to have more suggestion from you ?

In my opinion, this matter depends on many aspects and conditions. The advantages are visible. If the students understand how to use certain technological tools appropriately, they would certainly have more access to knowledge or are able to conduct research as requested in some subjects at school. They will likely be more interested in and focused on their task because they have more information resources to explore and study by themselves. For example, in the 4.0 era, instead of giving students an exercise on paper, teachers nowadays can use SmartClass+ for teaching language, which would be more efficient and undoubtedly convenient for them to operate their class than how it is done traditionally. On the other hand, however, the teachers will also have to catch up with the technology and know how to use and apply it in practice. Most students in this modern time are considered as the Z generation, who grew up with technology, the internet, and social media. They tend to demand more from the teachers, not only in terms of quality but also the pedagogical methodology. This may become a problematic issue if the teacher refuse to adopt new technology, being too conservative to accept changes to suit the new type of learners. In conclusion, whether students being more familiar with using technological tools is a problem or an advantage depends on the way teachers think about technology: threat or opportunity. 

Chalks, boards, notebooks, and pens were once technology, however, their privilege place was taken by the so-called digital networking, computers, or advanced apps that can engage our young generations. There come both positive and negative consequences.

Using technology tools can help students complete their assignments efficiently and effectively, which can benefit both learners and educators. It's is too old-fashioned to bring a paperback dictionary to look up new words when there are tons of online dictionaries. Just by one click, the meanings of words disappear with a lot of illustrations and example sentences. No one is learning the grammatical rules by heart when Grammarly is free to download. Students in some schools no longer take notes in the notebooks but use google drive for saving information learned and sharing them with teachers and friends. I believe most teachers are familiar with Google Classroom and ClassDojo, which assignments can be assigned and checked in a scientific way. Students can know exactly what they have to do, when it dues and what the expectations are. Therefore, knowing and using those technology tools can save learners' time, providing resources and scaffolding those young generations.

There are also many negative consequences. However, I would like to focus on 1 problem that I am facing with in my class today, which is PLAGIARISM. Plagiarism is defined as the act of taking another person's work and using it as if it is your own. With the development of technology, plenty of websites that can help paraphrase (like quillbot.com) have appeared. My students just copied and pasted the whole paragraphs. Turnitin, even though was applied to avoid plagiarising, is useless in this case. Knowing technology did help students do the wrong things. They did not achieve any skills or knowledge when stealing other's ideas like this. It is totally illegal.

With technology, everything just becomes so easy, easy to learn and easy to commit a crime.

The advantage of  educational technology is undoubted. However, I would like to point out some drawbacks of this issue. Although technology tools assist language teaching and learning in some extent, it depends on how properly a teacher exploit the technology and how willingly learners adapt to those tools. Especially, the more tech students or learners expose to, the weirder their characteristics are. I mean, they would probably lack of communication skills, or show no respect to their teachers.  It is because they get used to communicating via internet (e.g. chatting, texting) they are not comfortable to meet someone  in the flesh,  or they are simply confused when they should talk to somebody in real life. They are so tech-dependent that their brains won't work at full. A simple division, say 100 divided by 25, need to be solved with a calculator. What a shame! That leads to the so-called “the lazy thinker”. It is getting worse for youngsters who are addicted to technology,  and strongly bound to social media, which makes such people socially isolated. They definitely expertise in replying to a message via messengers, Twitter, Instagram in their own-age language. In fact they don't know how to reply to an email properly. 

Budget is also something to be worth considering while the technology industry has been developing more and more advanced tools. Accordingly, teachers are required to have higher technology competence otherwise the resourcefulness of technology is almost useless. 

I don't mean tech assistance would be a vital problem because it depends on its users as long as both parties, teachers and learners, need to be actively cooperative, and willing to adapt the technological advance effectively . 

From my perspective, this issue has its own benefits and drawbacks because of some following reasons. The main beneficial aspect of students' proficiency in using technological tools is reducing the workload for the teachers. The students can use technology such as networking, computers, and so on in the classroom is not only makes them become more active in learning but also memorize much more information by themselves. Additionally, the students also help their teachers in using technological tools in case there is some trouble with these tools that the teachers cannot fix it. However, the students may become subjective and they do not pay attention to the lessons anymore.

We live in a society in which technology is playing a very important role in every aspect of life. Technology provides numerous tools that teachers can use in and out of the classroom to enhance student learning.  This will increase the possibility of promoting specific types of learning activities, and construct significant types of learning that enable users to interact with each other while also stimulating their personal activity level.

Technology can help improve teaching. Teachers can use different apps or trusted online resources to enhance the traditional ways of teaching and to keep students more engaged. Virtual lesson plans, grading software and online assessments can help teachers save a lot time. This valuable time can be used for working with students who are struggling. What is more, having virtual learning environments in schools enhances collaboration and knowledge sharing between teachers. Technology can help students develop many practical skills, including creating presentations, learning to differentiate reliable from unreliable sources on the Internet, maintaining proper online etiquette, and writing emails. These are very important skills that can be developed in the classroom. Technology can encourage collaboration with students in the same classroom and same school. By using technology in the classroom, students can gain the skills they will need to be successful in the future.

It is clearly that being a language teacher in this technological era when the young generation is excellent at computer skill which we, the older generation, are not as good as they are is likely a difficult duty.  However, the use of technological tools in language teaching shall bring a very good result for both of teachers and students.  To clarify the advantages and disadvantages of technological tools in language teaching, some of points are described as follows:

 

Technology helps teacher bring knowledge to students in the attractive way by creating his/her own lecture with many interesting effects that help the lesson more interesting. It is also support a teacher to find data and information with a very short time to prepare a lesson with many lively contents.  

Some cases that a teacher may not good at technology, it may be become a problem. The young students are eager to learn something new, something mordern, but a teacher just only want student to read books, not knowledge on the internet. That may be boring.

Teacher should improve technology skill to bring many interesting lesson to the classroom. It is clearly that not good at technology is a problem for a language teacher in this technological era.

Do language teachers take advantages or disadvantages when to apply the technological tools in class or not?

According to me, technology helps students to stay motivated during the learning process. It helps to make the lessons fun and interesting more with videos and games. Addition, technology in the classroom encourages collaboration. Kids can practice what they were taught immediately. Besides, teachers have more credibility when they use technology in the classroom. Giving homework assignments that require computer access to a student without that technology at home would be a waste of time.

However, the presence of technology can be distracting to students. When kids play video games, they can find themselves reacting with addiction-like behaviors. Using tech can cause some students to disconnect from the classroom and Some technologies could replace the teacher in some classrooms. It is very hard to be take attention to students to teachers.

There’s no right or wrong side of this debate. Educational technology has its plusses and minuses. It’s up to teachers, students and the administration on our own.

The modern technological tools were born with many beneficial and harmful uses. From my perspective, children nowadays can adapt to high-tech instruments is both advantages and disadvantages for language teachers.

Firstly, high-tech tools give language teachers a vast choice of building their lesson plans. The assistance of technological tools surely provides language teachers with many choices to make their lessons more vivid. For instance, in the old days, classrooms were consisting of blackboards and chalks, and all the students just need to sit still and listen to their teacher; nonetheless, in these days, with the appearance of technology, language teachers can add videos, pictures, and many colorful materials into their teaching and classroom, which make the lesson become more energetic with many activities, games, and other attractive approaches to students. Furthermore, students with the ability of faster adapting to high-tech instruments, teachers can deliver the lesson to the students easier and quicker.

However, the ability to cope with technological tools of students could cause some big troubles to language teachers. For instance, students may pay their concentration more on the high-tech like mobile phones surfing the internet rather than listen to the teacher's lesson. For this reason, teachers are put into a situation of making a better lesson that could be interesting enough to make them forget using their technological tools. As a result, the rules inside the class should be set to prevent students from trying to use their high-tech devices and teachers should be focusing on those who use their devices too often.

Finally, in my opinion, students who know how to use modern devices can help language teachers in the class. As long as teachers can cooperate with them, the lesson can go smoothly, effectively, and raise the students’ enthusiasm in learning language.