From Paper to Paperless - Marisa Constantinides – 18th April 2011

Marisa begins explaining her talk is for course providers, teacher trainers, prospective trainers and/or awarding bodies. This friendly techno-savvy Greek teacher trainer begins by asking the audience if we thought technology should be dealt with during CELTA training – this initiated a good discussion about the pros and cons of the matter. Everyone in the room voted for technology, since that now is a fact and not an option.

Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to teach without technology or referring to it in classrooms, especially those for teacher trainers. Marisa commented that at some point she’s been snickered at for being a Twitter user besides being in favour of other digital tools – go figure!

Technophobia still seems to be a recurrent problem for many teachers and teacher trainers and it sounds as if they do not understand how important it is to be able use a computer in the 21st century! As she sees it, if tutors don’t do something, this problem won’t be solved soon.

Marisa elicited ideas of how several aspects of English teaching could be dealt with using technology – a shower or ideas came out: wikis, Twitter, Skype, a Voice threads, so on and so forth. The sky is the limit, but she suggests that only a bit of technology is introduced at a time, because “technology with a big T can be frightening.”

We are then presented with a Teacher-Trainer Basic Tool Kit:

•    Basic core skills
•    Collaborative tools
•    Voice tools
•    Search skills
•    VLE
•    Social media
•    Wikis
•    Blogs

Every teacher / teacher trainer should be able to use the above to accompany the present times and not be out-of-date.

However, there’s a large number of people who still refuse to change.  All the same, we need to encourage institutions to use technology in a broad sense by using it actively in our own classrooms to set an example. After all, it’s no big deal!

Can we be made Paperless already? She believes we’re not prepared yet, but there are many pros and we must insist. This is progress.

Do get in touch with Marisa and express your views:

Twitter: @Marisa_C
Email: info@celt.edu.gr