esl together
Rationale
The use of technology in the classroom is a hot issue. Debates swirl around the many challenges and opportunities brought up by new technology, and how these may affect, improve or transform learning. In the language classroom the debate is no different. The potential for using new technology to help students learn languages has not escaped many teachers around the world. The question becomes, however, how can we effectively integrate that technology into our classrooms? Harmer (2015) provides an extensive list of the equipment and tools that are on offer. However, as Harris and Hofer (2011) argue, successful integration of technology into the curriculum occurs “at the nexus of curriculum requirements, students’ learning needs, available technologies’ affordances and constraints, and the realities of school and
classroom contexts” (p. 211). That is, teachers must allow their use of technology in the classroom to be informed by their pedagogical knowledge, their content knowledge and their technological knowledge, what is referred to as TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, as cited in Harris & Hofer, 2011).
There are many advantages to using technology in the language classroom. Harmer (2015) notes several ways in which technology can be useful. For example, technology facilitates our ability to show and share resources, images, materials and more with our students. It helps facilitate collaboration both in face-to-face scenarios and in ones in which students live many hours apart, through the use of wikis, social networking sites, online forums and so on. Students and teachers can also find helpful videos or share videos they have made.
This unit presents another way in which technology can be integrated into a language learning module, through the use of Google Slides in a collaborative writing activity.
PowerPoint and other presentation-building software have generally been criticised in the literature. Jordan and Papp (2013), for example, look at the rise and fall in popularity of PowerPoint in the classroom, and note that the very strong opposition to it as instructional tool largely arises from how it is used. The problem with PowerPoint, they argue, is that it has limitations in presenting information, it redirects focus onto the slides and away from the lecturer and the content, it limits interaction and discussion, and it neglects a wide range of teaching and learning styles. The authors then suggest ways in which teachers can use PowerPoint to their advantage in the classroom by incorporating techniques to make the teaching more interactive and student-centred.
Tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides, however, present many more opportunities in the language classroom than just as a means for a teacher to present information and stimulate discussion. In particular, Google Slides is a free web-based presentation program which allows users to create and edit presentations while working with others in real time. It is available as a web application, which users can access from a browser, and it can also be downloaded as a Chrome application to be used offline on one’s laptop, or as a mobile application to be used on one’s smartphone.
The accessibility and mobility of Google Slides open up a world of possibilities with regards to its use as a pedagogical tool. Not only does it enable students to collaborate together on projects, but it allows provides a means for students to peer-edit, receive and provide feedback, and track changes in real time, even when they are apart (Suwantarathip & Wichadee, 2014). Collaborative writing activities in the language classroom have been shown to benefit learners’ L2 development by scaffolding learning (Storch, 2005) and forcing learners to focus on their own output and notice gaps in their linguistic knowledge (Mirzaei and Eslami, 2015). Therefore, Google Slides has the power to enhance and transform that learning approach by completely revolutionising the way that students interact during the collaborative process.