Digital Portfolio Entry #1

Aside from being able to use technology efficiently, I am quite content with my content and pedagogical knowledge thanks to my undergraduate major being Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Without the background knowledge and the essence of teaching, no one can guide their students even though they are technology experts. I had a rigorous practicum time which was exactly 124 hours in my senior year at a prestigious high school. I taught English to both preparation and sophomore classes. Being in a real classroom setting with almost 30 students taught me how to be a good observer because aside from my own teaching, I had the opportunity to observe experienced high school teachers in their own classes. One thing that I always consider is how to make my lessons student-centered. If my lesson does not cater to developing my students English proficiency, then what am I doing by taking all the taking time to myself? In this case, I highly take several language teaching theories such as Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, communicative language theory, and task-based & project-based language teaching into account. Learning language is more about grammatical structures, it is all about being able to communicate meaningfully with someone in the target language. Most of the language classes do not adapt real life communication just like how we communicate in our daily lives. If we are not going to cater to the needs of our students, then what is the point of teaching English? I am adequately confident in creating scaffolding for off-task moments. I often ask a lot of comprehension checking questions, and evaluate their background knowledge. It is also very easy for me to tell whether a student understood the lesson or not.

My biggest strength is being a digital native myself, so I am already aware of the practices I would want in an English classroom as a student. I, myself spend a lot of time using technology aka my phone and my laptop. Since I was a young kid, I have always liked browsing on the web and exploring new, entertaining stuff like YouTube videos and video games. Therefore, I can sort of guess what would my students like to see in a technology integrated language classroom. By relying on my not-so-advanced technology skills, I can create basic teaching materials on websites like Google Docs, Canvas, Worldwall and Moodle. I can also create new materials from scratch by using non-educative sites like Canva, Pinterest, YouTube, blog posts, social media, Reddit, and news outlets. However, there is one thing that I am not quite familiar with yet, and it is Virtual Reality. Unfortunately I haven't had to opportunity to spend time with a VR headset before. I always thought it would be fun to adapt it in a language class, but since it is an expensive equipment, I thought that would be impossible for classroom settings in Turkiye. With Technology-Infused Language Teaching, I intend to explore how to use VR efficiently and how to adapt it in my future lessons. I had the time to play with it briefly during class, and I can already see that there are many features we can utilize. First of all, it supports kinesthetic learning which is hard to find in a traditional classroom activity. Since it has many elements like audio and visuals, every skill can be integrated into it such as reading, writing, speaking, listening and vocabulary learning. It is also very very fun to use it! I am sure that some students have never used a VR headset before, so they would be curious to find out how to play with it. I am only a little confident in troubleshooting common tech problems without losing lesson momentum. I experienced technology related issues during my class before, and I still panic when something does not go how I wanted. Since I have very limited class time and a lot of content to teach, I usually end up leaving the technology based activity and resort to its traditional counterpart.

In conclusion, even though I have experience with teaching and using technology, I still feel very inadequate. There's more to learn about how future technologies can be beneficial in one's English learning journey. My goals for this semester is to learn how to troubleshoot better without losing time, bridge the gap between language teaching and technology by trying new things out such as VR technologies, and expand my AR toolkit by integrating informal learning materials.