Nowadays the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an important role, especially in the process of empowering the technology into ...
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Nowadays the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an important role, especially in the process of empowering the technology into educational activities. ICT is a diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information. These tools have changed the way of teaching and learning process. ICT tools are seen to be more advantageous for students in education such as communication, learning tools, administration, information sources, and distance learning.
According to the definition of ICT tools above, they can be considered the synonym for E-learning, which includes other types of learning, such as open learning, online learning, and blended learning. There are several reasons for using technology in language teaching. In addition to the fact that technology can be motivating, it offers the possibility to work autonomously or interact and collaborate with others. Technology also provides instant feedback on language performance in various tasks and exercises. Technology can also be an extension of the classroom and can be time-saving. Besides, technology can promote language learning with fresh authentic and motivating materials directly usable from the Internet. Finally, using ICT tools can help students to perform their assignments easily. They make students’ projects and assignments presentable, clean and organized.The most important reason for using ICT in learning aspect is interaction and communication. As mentioned by Rodrigues (2002, pp. 134-135) “effective learning happens when students are interactively engaged in a learning task.” It allows the learners to experience their learning processes, being interactive, enjoy and have fun with technology. By using technology to support collaborative learning, there will be not only human-machine interaction but also human-human interaction. Web-based- learning context, for instance, allows the students to interact with teachers or other students mediated by machine. Secondly, the implementation of ICT in the field of education gradually replaces the traditional teaching pedagogy. By using ICT tools, students’ learning is not limited to the school hours, demographically where they are, and who their teachers are. Face to face classroom interaction is getting replaced by online communication, traditional white or blackboard is getting replaced by an interactive whiteboard, and books or printed resources are getting replaced by on-line resources. Therefore, students become self-managed in their learning process. There are some ICT tools that are very essential to language learning and teaching such as Rewordify, Text Summarization, and Youtube. The first one Rewordify is naturally a user-friendly website allows you to adjust the reading level of a text. All you need to do is copy the webpage URL of the text you want to adjust and paste it into the yellow box at the top of the site, then click “Rewordify text.” Rewordify will simplify the text to the reading level you selected in the settings. If you don’t want the whole page to be Rewordified, you can copy, paste, and Rewordify text excerpts as well. You also can change how the text is displayed. My favorite part of the tool is to have simpler words displayed next to the challenging words that were in the original text. Finally, if you click on the “Print/Learning Activities” page, Rewordify will create vocabulary lists with definitions from the text, generate vocabulary quizzes for the text, and create close activities for the text. With this website, you can make more challenging texts accessible to all students. The second one is Text Summarization, which is a handy website that summarizes any text or webpage to the exact number of sentences you want. Like Rewordify, all you need to do is copy the text you want to summarize and paste it into the box on the page, set the number of sentences you want, then hit the summarize button. You can also paste in URLs to summarize an entire webpage or upload files to summarize. What makes this tool even more user-friendly is you can drag the bookmark widget to your toolbar so that when you are on a website you want summarized, all you have to do his hit the Text Summarization widget and it will summarize the page without even going to their website. And the final ICT tool I like best is Youtube. One way to collate the videos created by a screencast tool is to start a YouTube channel and upload them all there. This is simply your own YouTube home page – you can style the background, upload profile information and follow other channels of interest. You can also create playlists within your channel to organize videos into topics and allow students to find them easily. If creating your own videos is not for you then you can create playlists of videos that are already out there that relate to the topics you are studying.
As a conclusion, we can say that ICT tools are highly significant in the fields of education because they are very essential in helping students acquire the skills they need, deepening and enhancing the learning process, offering countless resources in the online world, changing the way teachers teach, helping teachers make their teaching and learning more meaningful and fun. Using ICT tools in teaching and learning in the 21st century can enhance the level of education as well as the quality of education among the students, and the teachers (Ager, 1998, p.8).