Using Technology in English Learning: Overcoming the Digital and Generation Divides

Both digital divide and generation divide are difficulties that we encounter when we use ITC in English learning. On the one hand, digital divide is the lack of computers, IWBs, or a proper internet connection in classrooms, as well as the lack of a computer room. On the other hand, generation divide refers to digital natives (students) with respect to non-digital natives (teachers and parents). The reason for generation divides is the late incorporation of technology into our teaching practice, lack of facilities, and training.

Storybird is a tool for reading skills and contains short, art-inspired stories that are curiously fun to make, share, and read. You can choose from hundreds of drawings and images and then write a story to go with them. The website is free to sign up and class accounts are possible. Finished story books can be embedded into blogs or read via the website. It would be a fantastic way to show parents what their children read in class.

HOTPOTATOES is a simple exercises generator and is considered an authoring tool. With Hot Potatoes, we have 6 authoring tools: JQuiz (to create question exercises with multiple answers, short answers, hybrids, and multiselection), JCloze (fill-in-space exercises), JMatch (relate exercises), JMix (exercises to sort elements: letters, sentences, ...), JCross (crossword exercises), and The Masher (create complete units of HP exercises).

SOCIAL SOFTWARE are tools which allow people to connect, communicate, and collaborate online. For example: Blog (a web page with regular online diary entries), Wiki (a collaborative web space, consisting of a number of pages that can be edited by any user), and Podcast (an audio/video file that is broadcast via the internet and can be downloaded).

Oral skills (Skype): Software founded in 2003 allowing users to make phone calls through the net using VoIP technology. It offers a wide variety of services including calls from fixed-lines or mobile phones, fax, and video calling. The proposed activity is to contact the students of a school in England for 1 hour and have a conversation about their families, interests, hobbies, etc. With this activity, students will have the opportunity to practice vocabulary, improvise, engage in real communication in English, and be motivated to meet new friends. It will be assessed through pronunciation and fluency, coherence and cohesion, vocabulary, and interaction. The activity will be carried out in a fifth grade where there are 28 students aged between 10 and 11 years old.

Listening skills (Voki): It is a great way to have students share their knowledge of a topic in 60 seconds or less. You can customize the character style, change the look, clothing and accessories, voice, and the background. The proposed activity is that groups of 4 students will create their own avatar and record a 60-second audio where they will tell a story and ask two questions at the end. The other groups will try to answer them. The objectives of this activity are to motivate students to participate, improve message comprehension, and introduce technology in a fun way. The activity will be assessed through understanding common phrases and vocabulary, as well as understanding the main theme of the topic.

Reading skills (Storybird). Writing skills (Dvolver Moviemaker): Storybird is a tool for creating short movies. The movie maker makes it easy to create and share short online movies, pairing cartoon-like backgrounds and characters with the user's ideas and text.