Creativity in online resources

This Monday we had a different lesson. It was conducted by Ricard Garcia, a teacher of Barcelona's University in the field of teaching English as a foreign language in the schools. He gave us a very interesting talk called "Creating, the way to learn", which was about how to implement multiple online resources in the classroom but in a creative way.

About this talk I am going to highlight some ideas that I found very necessary to be aware of in our future. Mr. Garcia said that, although nowadays children are "digital natives", they are not professionals using digital medias, but they like using them to play, as a hobby. We have to take advantage of this motivation that they have in front of digital resources and make children use them in a way that they can learn from it, so that they can enrich the uses of technology and see that it is not only funny for playing but also for learning, and that implies learning English too!

Another advantage that he mentioned about digital resources is that they can be learned for most of us pretty quickly and easily. It is very dangerous to use a tool that you don't master in front of a class, so we ourselves have to practise and use this resources before we show them to children, but it is not going to take so much time to be confident with this tools and it could be a very original way to do an English class.

Moreover, Mr. Garcia also stands out the idea of increasing student's self-esteem with this resources. Because of the easy way this resources can be learned and the beautiful aesthetic they have, every student could be able to do a great job by himself and it could be very heart-warming to show to their families and friends the final results of their works in the English class.

Despite of this advantages, teachers also have to be careful of two aspects. The first one is that we have to keep the balance between digital resources and the non-digital ones. Although technology can be very appropriate and enriching in some cases, not everything has to be done with it, sometimes we will also have to keep using "ordinary" materials. We are responsible for recognizing which resource fits better to the goals of every lesson. And also, it is important to be aware that in many cases, before using the digital resource that we have planned, students will have to prepare carefully what are they going to do with the digital app by writing it by hand...etc it will be only when they are ready with this previous preparation that they will be able to use the digital resource. If we don't prepare the activity step by step and we allow children to "play" with the online tool directly from the beginning, it can happen that they get distracted by the app and they don't manage to do a good job.

To finish with this post, once Ricard Garcia ended this interesting introduction, he started showing us a wide range of digital resources that I personally had never seen before. Although I am not going to mention all of them because they were quite a lot, the ones that I liked the most were those which allowed students to create animated stories, digital timelines, digital posters, speaking avatars, youtube videos with questions included, to dub Bollywood film clips or write their own books with beautiful illustrations. These are some examples of the websites and apps that Mr. Garcia showed us and by which we can improve the speaking, reading, writing, ... and more English competences learning in a creative and funny way! I am definitely going to use some of this resources in my English classes.