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About teachers, materials and new generations...


As teachers, at the moment of deciding the kind of materials we are going to use for our lessons, we usually debate whether to use or not the course book. It is undeniable that course books have many advantages, but it is also important to mention that they are not everything. 

To design our own material has a crucial role when planning our lessons. One of the reasons for this is that teachers can adapt this material to the needs of each particular group freely. This contextualization is an important tool that text books do not offer. By designing our own materials teachers can adapt it to the students´ own culture and also we can take into account all those factors that may affect their learning process such as age, interests, background knowledge, among others. Moreover, a way to contextualize our materials nowadays is by paying attention to the new technologies. 

As Marc Prensky (2001) explains, currently, new generations are increasingly immersed in the world of technologies so teachers -inevitably- are required to do the same. Our students, unlike teachers, are growing in a constant interaction via social networks and with many digital devices surrounding them. Students´ reality is not the same as the one that teachers used to have. Because of this, teachers need to adapt themselves to the new world so as to be able to achieve their goals. To do this, educators need not only to learn how to use digital tools but also to provide their students with resources and strategies to use them in the most profitable way. 

Educators must be aware that fast-changing times affect our students and we can take part of this by taking advantage of the new technologies. It depends on us. 
References 
Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Inmigrants. NCB Univerity Press, Vol. 9 No. 5.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 7, 2017 at 12:29 PM

    This is an interesting post! Thanks for sharing!
    Laura and Abigail

    ReplyDelete

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