First of all, if you’re looking for an in depth review of educational technology, I apologise. This post is my reflection on the development of technology during my time in EFL. I may go into further detail of some of the applications mentioned in a later post. When I started in EFL about twenty years ago, teaching technology was very scarce. If you were lucky, there might be an overhead projector (OHP) or two, a video player and television, a music cassette player (incorporating a CD player if the school really splashed out). DVDs weren’t as common as they were a few years later. YouTube had yet come into existence. The little technology that we had in the school had to be booked out, so if you needed it for a lesson, you might sometimes have to negotiate with the other teachers.
When I first started teaching, I found using my computer a good way of preparing lessons (and having a way to store resources for future reference). If you wanted to share these lessons with colleagues, you could always save material to a floppy disk. Later you could record data on a CD, and eventually a USB. Then came the ‘cloud’, another way of storing and retrieving resources.
Up until about twenty-five years ago, I had no interest in computers or mobile devices. Once I decided to try them, there was no going back and I saw many advantages in using them in language learning and teaching. One year, my Director of Studies (DoS) suggested I give a talk to the school teacher’s conference on using technology in the EFL classroom. I wasn’t keen at first, as I wasn’t used to talking about subjects in front of my peers and strangers. I managed to put a few topics together for my talk such as using the radio, webquests, using the newer technologies (such as Twitter) and corpora. Quite a few teachers were interested by my information on corpora (as it wasn’t as developed as it is now). When I arrived at the conference, I was advised that I couldn’t use the computer room for my session. I had to point out that having a lecture on technology without any access to technology for practical use was just a bit silly. Luckily, the powers that be agreed with me (eventually). At the time, I printed many handouts for my talk. These days I would probably make them available in Dropbox or on Google Docs. All this happened about fifteen years ago,
It was on my train journey home from one of these conferences that I read an article in the Saturday Guardian magazine about Web 2.0. This term had been coined a couple of years earlier and was now receiving a lot of press coverage. One of my friends was studying a course at university and knowing of my love of music, she told me about LastFM (an early music streaming service). I therefore became more and more interested in all the new technology developing and each time tried to see how I could relate it to an EFL context. A few years later, I attained my MA in Online and Distance Education.
