IT in education

In the articles and Svensson's book, which are a part of this module, we read about the importance of using computers and IT in our language teaching. Marc Prensky calls us Digital Immigrants and the generation which has grown up with computers, Digital Natives, and his opinion is that the immigrants will never quite learn to speak the language of the natives. But still we have to adjust to the natives and not the other way around. His suggestion is to turn teaching into a computer game since the natives play a lot of computer games, thus assuming that most of the natives are are interested in gaming.

In Svensson's book we read about different ways of using computers and IT in language teaching and I find it a very interesting book with a lot of ideas that I want to try and some that I am already using.

I had a discussion about using IT with my B-course students today. They are a group of 18 students aged between 19 and 46 with half of the students born between 1985 and 1991, thus belonging to the Digital Natives according to my opinion. I asked them how many play computer games and it was about half of the group (mainly the younger ones) and they agreed that you can learn English by playing games such as World of Warcraft. But they didn't think you learned so much social competence which is considered so important when finding a job today.
Then I asked them if they thought we should use more IT in the different subjects and to my surprise their answer was a more or less unanimously no. I'm very aware that my small group of students is not a source of scientific proof, but one may wonder if it is the students or the various writers and researchers who think we should use more IT in our teaching?

With that said, I do think we can have a great use of IT in language teaching and my brain is working hard trying to turn the knowledge I've gained so far in this course into practice.