ESSAY ABOUT THE DIDACTIC APPLICATION OF

TECHNOLOGICAL RESOURCES IN THE ENGLISH CLASS

By Irati Berraondo Ibarguren

THE USE OF THE BLOG

What is a blog?

A blog is a space on the internet that offers the possibility of storing any kind of documents, images,
articles, videos and links to other digital resources that respond to the reason why the blog was
created. It is a public website that is often controlled by an entity with commercial aims, or the
objective of offering and interchanging information about a current topic, studies... So the blog also
includes the possibility to communicate. Nowadays, creating a blog is available to anyone who is
interest on it and it is a free service. The true is that with the spread of the new technologies and
with the idea that ours is the generation digital era, I think teaching our students how to use this tool
and developing a critical sense to choose the information from the very numerous resources they
can access corresponds with the curricular objective of developing the digital competence. It would
be an error to ignore such a useful tool in the classroom because of the usual association between
the internet and the leisure-time.

In this essay I will try to propose some ideas to give the technological resources the place they
deserve in education and explain some uses I would give them in the English classroom. This does
not mean they are not useful for the rest of the subjects, I believe we should take advantage of them
in each of the subject (and at the same time, not to depend on them). But as the didactic application
that the new technologies offer each time are broader and as this essay is the result of a term using a
blog, and creating Hot Potatoes and webquest exercises aswell, with the objective of discovering
their didactic applications in an English class, I will focus on the use of those resources for teaching
English at the school.

How use it in class?

The main risks of using a blog are, on the one hand, that students have access to the internet and
they can be wasting time by going to other websites that have nothing to see with the objectives
they are suppose to achieve. On the other hand, if the teacher decides to us her/his own blog to
clarify questions, send exercises and tasks, or give instructions of what the students have to do next,
the classroom activity could become predictable and boring, and some students could ignore the
teacher´s oral explanations as they could find them in the blog. Finally, we cannot forget that blogs
do not guarantee a meaningful knowledge if it isn´t the teacher who possibilities it by proposing
appropriate exercises and a coherent sequencing of the classroom activities. In the following lines I
will explain some uses teacher could give the blog and at the same time, propose some solutions to
the problems mentioned.

The first thing I would ask them to do after creating their own blog, would be to add some attaches
and links to useful websites and gadgets they could probably use during the following lessons such
as translators, dictionaries, websites with interesting books, complementary exercises and
explanations.. and also the lists with the blogs of their classmates and the teachers´ blog in order to
have access to see others´ work and get help from them or help the others. The class blog is a
perfect tool for this last purpose, the students can talk each other and also to the teacher about the
things they don´t understand, or they find difficult or interesting and they want to know more bout.
I would prepare a clear list that wouldn´t substitute my own explanations. I think it would be a good
idea to explain what the students have to do before going to the computer room if it´s not totally
necessary the use of a website or visual resource for the explanations; in that way I would avoid the
students just looking to the instructions in my blog and following them mechanically. In the list I
would always propose two kind of exercises: The first ones (a different numbers of exercises
depending on the objectives and the exercises itself) which would be compulsory for all the
students. But expecting that some of the students might work faster than the others, I would prepare
some other that would be optional, in order to avoid students getting bored or wasting time.

Creating students´ blogs would be a good way to assess the works and exercises completed by using
technological resources. As a teacher, I would ask them to write a journal or diary about the
exercises we do each day in class in their blog, so that they can assess their own development and I
can also have more materials to assess. The diary gives the teacher the opportunity of assessing
what the student´s have understand and might find some doubts the shy pupils did not ask in class.
Having their own blog give each student the responsibility of a space they have to organize, and
complete with the production of classroom exercises, tasks and projects and also including things
that correspond with their interests. They are responsible of choosing the materials they find
appropriate for their blog taking into account what they want to achieve with it and who is that
information directed to.

Something unusual, but I think it is a good idea, is to give the students in primary the opportunity to
entry the blog from their home. I don´t mean at all that the blog could substitute the attendance to
class, I wouldn´t even at university level (except for the subjects precisely designed to be attended
on line). But in primary schools, the students haven´t any contact with the school once they get
home if it´s not because of the homework. By using the blog they could know what their classmates
have done in class in case they couldn´t go to school that day, by getting into the teacher´s blog or
asking a college in the class blog. The students could communicate between them and with the
teacher to solve problems they can find in an exercise or in a task proposed in class.

In my opinion the resources we have seen during this term such as the Hot potatoes exercises, the
webquest, the different websites for learning English and why not, the blog itself, offer the
opportunity to adapt the learning process to the level of each children and that is an advantage the
teachers should always take into account, even if this suppose more work for us, our objective is to
help each students to reach the goals and adapt the process to their individual needs.

By creating and using the blog we would be working on cross-curricular contents such as being
autonomous, interpersonal relationships (when helping the others or asking them for help), the use
of digital resources and a critical point of view when searching for information on the internet and
of course the language, in this case English.

HOT POTATOES EXERCISES

What is “Hot Potatoes”?

It is a free technological tool that offers the possibility of creating different kind of exercises, very
useful to work language grammar, vocabulary, semantic and comprehension, and even cultural
contents. The main use I would give this resource is to prepare exercises related to the topic or the
skill the students are learning in the English class. The main advantage of this tool is that you can
create specific exercises related to the topic you are working with or focus on any other aspects
your students might need to reinforce, for example, the past tense. Another advantage of this tool is
that the teacher is able to adapt the exercises to the level of the students, so that he/she can design
exercises for students from any level, but also design specific exercises for students with special
needs. It also includes the possibility of inserting additional texts, songs, videos and links that can
help the students, and the option to include background images and colors lets the designer to make
the exercise more attractive.

Hot potatoes exercises are ready to design five different kind of exercises:

J- Mix

I think this one is very useful to work grammar as the students have to choose the correct place of
the words in order to complete a coherent sentence. The teacher can choose the skills he/she wants
to work in each one, but I would advise to make series of sentences to work only one skill. For
example:

With students that already control the present and the past simple, we could use this kind of exercise
to introduce new vocabulary if we ask them to complete structures they already know but include a
word they don´t know, as in the case of a definition. I would never use this kind of exercises to
teach new rules, they should be used only to practice rules they already know, or they might could
be used to introduce a rule by asking them to try out a sentence, but then explaining the rule. This
last observation should be applied to all the Hot Potatoes exercises.

J- Cloze

This exercises consist on filling the gabs of a text. It could be use to assess the comprehension of
the students, their competence to elicit the meaning from the context, and the correct use of the
vocabulary.

J- Match

This kind of exercise is based on the correspondence between two elements such as a word and the
image that represents it, although it is not the only one possibility. The images are very useful for
beginner students who still are not able to express themselves writing or have recently began to
read.

J- Cross

In this exercise the students have to fill in the crosswords basing on the clues given in the exercise.
In this case we would be working the comprehension and the vocabulary.

J- Quiz

This is a multiple-choice exercise that also requires the students to activate their comprehension
skills to understand the question and choose the correct answer or discriminate the incorrect ones.

The main disadvantage of the Hot Potatoes exercises are the following ones:

1) The exercises aren´t meaningful by themselves, so they must be related to the students´
previous knowledge in some way, either by the topic, their interests or the use of this
exercises as a practical part of the learned rules.
2) Some of the exercises are quite mechanical and they look like games but if we don´t vary
them, the students could get bored.
3) Creating new exercises do not require a high computer knowledge level, but thinking on the
 best exercises for our students and creating and putting them in our blog needs a lot time.

Anyway, we are not forced to design the five kind of exercises, or to upload them to the web since
there is the possibility to print them, so Hot Potatoes is a very useful tool to create complementary
exercises to the daily practice.

WEBQUEST

What is a webquest?

A webquest is a task-based or even project-based tool (depending on how long it takes) that
includes:

1) Students working individually and group-working. This aspect should be assessed at the end
of the webquest since it is based on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and
according to this, the learning process must include the social (personal and interpersonal)
skills as well as the communicative skills.

2) A series of tasks and instructions related to a topic. The topic is the element that gives the
whole process coherence.

3) It is based on the constructivist approach and as in the case of the Hot Potatoes exercises, the
webquest is a tool that let students to apply the knowledge they have already learnt and
reinforcing it by using it in a meaningful and entertaining way. That is why the contents that
appear in it, have already been taught in the classroom, and the language is adapted to the
level of the students.

4) Following and completing the tasks to get a final objective or creating a final product.

5) Performing in front of the classmates.

6) Assessment that includes different points of view. Usually the teacher´s assessment and the
student´s individual self-assessment though sometimes the other students also analyze their
mates´ work.

Looking to the elements webquest include is easy to guess the advantages of using them in the
English class; apart from the different groupings, the coherent process based on the students
previous knowledge, the final performance and the assessment that let the student know their own
development, the use of realia or authentic materials such as videos, texts and audios that make the
learning process more meaningful. It is very important the topic to respond to the students interests
and the tasks proposed in the process to have be related to reality and practicality. The introduction
of the webquest should take into account this last aspect and create a context in which the students
feel the need of completing the tasks correctly.

When students work with webquests, they are forced to use it in practical contexts, to discuss with
their classmates, to complete the tasks and the final work and also to perform in front of the class.
Since the moment the language becomes a medium to reach a goal and not in the goal itself, the
students are acquiring it, so webquests have always been very used from the point of view of
developing communicative competences. Language is used in two levels: In a more private field in
which accuracy is not so important but fluency (when working in pairs or groups) and another one
in which accuracy takes importance as it is the case of presenting a written work or speaking in
public. This is a very good reason why webquest should be used in class to teach language.

Webquest present some characteristics that could be a disadvantage if we don´t take them into
account:

1) We must control the timing and the number of contents the students are suppose to work in
it. If the project gets too long the students could lose the meaningful character of the
webquest.

2) Another problem we might find when working with webquests is that the content seems to
be more important than language. It is very important to not to forget teaching formal
aspects of the language, and plan how to do this previously, not just waiting to the doubts
the students might have during the process. In the case of creating a webquest we should
think on the linguistic aspects we want to work with before designing it. And in the case we
use an already existing webquest, we should take into account the level of language, the
adequacy of the contents and the possibilities of modifying it in order to make the
experience more meaningful

To finish with Hot potatoes exercises and webquests I must remember that there are a plenty of
exercises and tasks of these kind, so in some cases it makes worth to look first what materials have
already been created and then decide to use them as they are, modify them or create new materials.
When we create new materials and we public them on the internet, we are also offering other
teachers or anyone interested on this kind of exercises and tasks, the possibility of using them
themselves or with their students. In my opinion, the main advantage of using materials we find on
the internet is that we can share them with other teachers that might be in our situations.