Reflection of the Seminar "New Media in FLT" (Obligatory Entry #4)
During winter term 2015/16 I attended the seminar “New Media in Foreign Language Teaching” at Philipps-University Marburg in course of my studies for future teachers of English. The main goal of the course was to equip the students with knowledge about the use of new media in educational purposes and show the benefits as well as the risks of new media use at school. In fact, I can state that the course was very important to me personally because I had little experience in teaching English with new media support and preferred traditional teaching methods since I knew little about how to use new media efficiently for teaching and planning a media based teaching session.
Before attending the course, my expectations were quite high: I wanted to work with new media on my own to improve my personal media skills which were relatively rare, I wished to get a precise impression of how new media actually can be used in classroom scenarios to improve teaching since I barely knew any tools which seemed applicable to me. Besides, I hoped that our teachers would not confront us with an idealised view on new media and try to convince us of new technology at all costs. I expected the teachers to accept our personal attitudes towards new media and give us an objective overview of all possibilities it offers and practise working with different teaching ideas. Having taken all the above mentioned points into consideration, I can conclude that the course met my personal expectations at a fair amount.
Especially, I liked about the course that many group activities were involved which fostered the exchange of knowledge, ideas and experiences. Because everyone had different previous knowledge and attitudes, diverse discussions and instructive teamwork enriched the course of the seminar, which was motivating and as a result contributed to a pleasant learning atmosphere. Furthermore, the content of the seminar was related to practical application all the time. We, for example, got to know new online tools, collected ideas about how to use an online tool/ medium/ teaching concept at school and in the next step checked out different tools and ideas in order to evaluate them. Therefore the seminar offered enough time to discuss and brainstorm in plenum and try out and deepen our ideas by means of group works or individual learning (portfolio entry). By means of that we had the chance to develop own lesson plans and teaching concepts including new media and deal with new knowledge in a creative and self-paced way.
At the end of the seminar, each student’s learning outcome should be documented in an online portfolio which enables us to focus on aspects which really interest us, dig deeper and recall our new gained knowledge in a very individual, artistic and free way. I like that very much because I have never concerned myself with creating a homepage which presents my personal developments and experiences concerning a special topic. In this case the e-portfolio is an unusual form appropriate to the content of the seminar, which I think is a nice possibility to show what we have learned during the semester.
What have I learned?
I learned how important media competence is for teachers because it offers many different opportunities. Due to the fact that media literacy becomes more and more important for students in modern information society; not only at school or university but also at the job market, media literacy is a core competence to access modern society. In addition to the fact that working with new media fosters the students' media literacy, it can constitute a motivating aspect of teaching which supports creative and self-regulated learning processes. In particular, the seminar introduced many different online tools supporting different key competences such as reading, listening, speaking and writing. (LIST OF ONLINE TOOLS) Above all, I was really inspired by tools such as storybird and bitsprips because ,in my eyes, they encourage students in dealing with topics in a creative and artistic way which offers them the opportunity to demonstrate their potential. Besides getting to know many new online tools, I could practise to evaluate these tools and decide whether I see a didactic surplus or nor.
Furthermore, I deepened and practiced lesson planning and it became clear to me that backwards planning of a lesson in terms of output orientation is crucial to foster competences the learners should acquire. While we talked about how to approach lesson planning, we also thematised different learning strategies and learner types and learned how to design teaching material for school in regard to the heterogeneity of learner types. This was new to me and I did not know that a teacher has to be so carefully designing effective tasks and worksheets. Therefore, it was helpful to be informed about important criteria of these aspects. Also connected to planning and designing lessons, I think it was beneficial that we dealt with national educational standards. According to that, we got to know the framework conditions of our teaching. Although knowing about these standards, I did not know about the exact content because it has never been addressed in one of my courses before.
In addition to that, I learned how to inform myself further about the issue of new media at school. Firstly, I know that Philipps-University Marburg offers several extra courses for future teachers which show how to use a whiteboard and support teachers’ media competence in regard to educational purposes. Moreover, there are several Facebook groups like “Educators using Facebook” where teachers from different countries exchange their experiences and ideas concerning new media in teaching. Furthermore, there are some websites which present teaching ideas integrating new media. Teachers can just visit these websites and explore new ideas. An example for that is “Unterrichtsideen” where teachers can just upload their ideas. Additionally, I got to know the “Virtuelles Zentrum für Lehrerbildung” which is an organisation cooperating with Philipps-University and offers an e-learning platform and different courses for teachers and trainees.
Finally, I learned much about data protection which is always assumed to be perfectly known, but, in fact, I did not know much about this issue or in particular how to create a save learning atmosphere for my future students. Concerning that, we talked about our duties as teachers, looked at rules and guidelines for teachers and received many hints from our teacher.
Which competences did I gain?
planning a lesson with media support (tools, inverted classroom)
overall media literacy (creating a website was completely new to me, testing online tools, working with web-based programmes)
critically evaluating online programmes (pros and cons)
selecting appropriate media support for lesson topics
designing worksheets
self-confidence in working with new media
What could have done better?
Indeed, I was very satisfied with the seminar because I learned a lot. Nevertheless, I would have appreciated if we as students could have collected more practical experiences with the whiteboard which was the key medium of the seminar. Although we used it every single session, many of the course participants did not have the chance to operate the whiteboard. Unfortunately, I have not used a whiteboard a single time in my life, yet. Concluding, I still do not know how to use it. I know that the university offers courses to show students how to use them, but these courses are extracurricular and optional. I think it should be a solid part of teacher education to show the opportunities a whiteboard can offer by means of practical exercise. Even tough schools might have different kind of interactive boards (whiteboard, smartboard etc.), future teachers should have a basic understanding of how the technology works. It could even be possible that I have to teach at a technologically well-equipped school during one of my internships and I would not be able to teach with a whiteboard in any way although I have already visited several courses on New Media (English studies and educational science). I guess it would be very valuable if teaching a (short) session using a whiteboard was an obligatory task for every participant visiting the seminar. I definitely would have liked to learn more about the basic operation of interactive boards and gained a practical approach because this is vitally important to prepare future teachers for their jobs. In general I think that using new media in educational purposes gets more and more important and should therefore be an obligatory part in everyone’s teacher training.
