Chapter 1  Technology in the classroom: Eric Baber

One thing I really love using, but unfortunately, it’s quite an expensive piece of technology,
so not all schools have it, is the data projector just connected to a laptop. And once you’ve
got that – it doesn’t even need to be, um, an electronic whiteboard, but just a projector – once
you’ve got that, there’s so much you can do. Um, for example, if – if you’re – one thing I
like to do is to always have one Word document open, um, and as the class progresses, if
students have questions about vocabulary or so, I collect them in this Word document and
put them up on the, on the data projector, um, and quite often I will add a definition or an
example sentence, or I will ask a student to come up to the laptop, write a definition into
the Word document next to the relevant word, um, so over the course of the lesson, we
might, you know, gather eight to ten pieces of vocabulary or whatever. So at any point in
the lesson, I can show them on the Word document, or if I wanted to do something else,
just minimize it. At the end of the lesson, I can save it, either email it to the students, um,
or print it out and – and – and hand it out to them, but I prefer emailing it to the students
so they’ve got an electronic record of it. That’s a really handy tip that I found really useful,
um, to just always sort of have a Word document running in the background.
Um, an-another thing about having just a computer with a PowerPoint – with – with
a data projector, is that you can use PowerPoint presentations that, um, the students have
brought in, for example. So if you’ve got business students or so, and they need to give a
presentation in English at some point, they can bring in the PowerPoint presentation on
a USB stick, um, and do a, a mock presentation to the whole class or if it’s one-to-one
lesson, just to you, and then you can work on very specific language items, so that’s, that’s
great. That’s, uh, very useful. Um, another good thing of just having a laptop connected
to a data projector, is if you’ve got Internet connection as well, you’ve got, you can have
anything you like at your fingertips straightaway. Um, coming back to the vocabulary
thing, if a student asks for a definition of something, um, if it’s at a lower level and, and it,
it’s an object or so, you can just go to Google Images, and immediately you’ve got a photo
of the object that he was … that the student was asking about. And just displaying that,
um, is so easy if you’ve got a data projector. So those are just some ideas of ways of using
technology in the classroom.

Dudeney & Hockly  How to Teach English with Technology  ©  Pearson Education Limited 2007
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