Westfir, Oregon TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

The importance in this unit comes from a point it does not say too loudly: that we cannot assume that all schools will have the technology and equipment that we are most used to using now, in fairly well funded and recent classrooms. At first I laughed when I was reading about cassette players and OHPs, thinking, "these are tools decades old, I used them when I was in school twenty years ago, surely everyone has moved on since then!" I was starting to think that this was an old unit/lesson, which hadn't been touched with updates for some time. However, I realized that certain schools may not have the resources or funds to be able to procure higher technology equipment, and may very well use these "outdated" pieces of equipment. For that reason, I realized how important it was to review the range of aids that a teacher might come in contact with, from low-tech to high-tech. It felt a little silly to review what a dictionary was and what role it played in the classroom, what with being able to access dictionaries online, but certain schools may not have computers for students to use -- thus, we must know how to best aid a student in using a dictionary. Smart boards feel like equipment you would see in very well funded schools, and thus perhaps something you would not see on a particularly regular basis -- however, we cannot discount the possibility of having to use one in the future, and we must be equipped with the knowledge of how to incorporate its use into the lesson.