Scared of technology

I read an interesting post in Classroom20 this morning about technology in the classroom and how teacher do or don’t use it or are afraid, etc. of it. I really like trying out new stuff with my students, not all of it tends to be tech or Web 2.0 based. I experiment with it a lot though and have many exercises online and these grow more each semester as I discover new things and sites to use. I have spent the last nine or ten days adding some links to most of my sites from Quizlet, the exercises it creates make some exercises that are similar to stuff I print out at the school for my CCAA students to use to revise for their mids and finals. I think there might be more than 400+ exercises online now plus some other extra sites like wikis. I tried a few times mentioning these to people I work with as well as sites like Quizlet or programs like Hot Potatoes to try to get them to create some stuff but I didn’t have a lot of success Its not so much fear I think, here in Brasil unis tend to teach Letras in a way that tells people there is no need for any new ideas, that the old ones are just fine that there is no need for any new fangled stuff. Its more or less the same ideas as people here believing we don’t need an English newspaper just because we don’t. Some of it is also laziness too, if i pretend i didn’t hear it’ll go away, very sad. A lot of students spent time online as part of their studies and its a natural progression for teachers to put stuff their for their students to use. I think also that students like this idea that their teacher took the time to create something just for them to use In the schools I work in only Orkut (a very boring social networking site) seems to hold peoples attention, They’ll spend hours playing around with it but not ten minutes to add a couple of lists of vocabulary to a site that creates everything for you from them. It’s very weird and at the same time very sad too. As teachers I think we have to try to take advantage of new things to help ourselves as well as our students to grow. I like to work at CCAA but I love the extra freedom I get at Cambridge to experiment and try out new stuff. I don’t really have a lot of online stuff for my students there right now but then again the Cambridge site already has a lot of stuff hosted on it that supports the students workbooks. They also provide a program that creates more online exercises based on the Cambridge corpus, I’ll def have to get ahold of a copy of this Good job my host gave me plenty of space Now if I could just get some of my collegues to make some stuff for the lower levels…