​A travel of reflection

As citizens of the 21st century, we all know that technology is everywhere around us. Our actual period has been often called “Digital Era”, “Information Age”, “Computer Age” or “New media Age”, and the future is expected to be more technological. Fortunately, we have been part of this “technology boom” at some point, but our future students will be born absolutely immersed in technology. At the moment, young kids probably know better how to use a tablet than his/her parents. At this point, as teachers of the immediate and distant future, we need to think in which context we are educating our students and where the knowledge is going.

 

Nowadays paradigms are changing, also in the educational field. Experts are rethinking how education should be approached. According to the sociocultural theory supported by some experts such as Vygotsky, knowledge arises from social interaction. Students need peers and the teacher’s guidelines to develop their ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development).

 

As this theory is quite broadly accepted, knowledge is understood -through this approach- as a dynamic and interactive process related to the students’ environment and reality. Therefore, projects might be a useful way to focus on the learning process because they are adapted to children’s needs and to the actual situation, which is characterised by technology. That is why TEPBLL (Technology-Enhanced Project Based Language Learning) seems to be an interesting approach to language learning.

 

As foreign language teachers -in our case in the field of ELT (English Language Teaching)-, we need to reflect on how our students will learn a foreign language better in a motivating way. Taking into account the features of our actual and future society, we can state that technology is part of our lives, so it becomes obvious that we need to integrate it to the classrooms as a tool and as a content. By content we mean that we need to teach how to use technology if we want our students to use it as a tool. And by tool, it is clear that technology is essential and useful for our day-to-day lives.

 

Now, let’s see how we can achieve all these aspects in the following section: Reflections: TEPBLL

 

And do not forget to read our group closing and the individual conclusions!