New Media for Old Teachers by Laurence Brillet

I used to love writing by hand. I would always have a pen in my bag and jot down ideas , unknown words, things I thought I did not want to forget. I still do to some extent, but not as much as before. Now I have the agenda in my cell-phone to make sure I won’t forget important things . I have written a huge number of letters in my life. As a teenager, I had penfriends all over the world and was prepared to wait up to two months to get a reply. Good old days some would say. Not really… Now we have the email. I keep in touch with loads of people around the world and instead of a pen (paper, envelopes, stamps and trips to the post-office), I just turn on any computer. Any. The difference is this: my friends know intantaneously what I am up to. It takes seconds to inform them of my next visit home. Seconds to make arrangements to meet up. This is our world:fast and changing.

How is all this related to Mr Grimshaw’s homework set to us last Friday? Well, if new technology is part of our every day life, it has to be reflected in our teaching style. I know I still have a long way to go to be a confident and experienced new media user but I want to get there. I started with a very simple power-point presentation ( with 7A as my guinea pigs). Then I got the students to do theirs on a voluntary basis. I was impressed at the enthusiasm I got from the students. The results were fantastic! I bravely tried to use movie-maker a few months ago. I must admit , that was not so good! I still have quite a bit of thinking to do about planning such projects. I am not afraid of taking my students to the IT lab to do some research and produce something that belongs to them,( not to me), from research to conception and production. Instead of using the old tape-recorder to do radio adverts the other day, I should have let my students get on with it and use their own computer to produce something which would have worked better than what we did in class. Tape-recorders are ancient they say and they don’t even know how to use them .

I am not afraid of new technology and new teaching methods that go with it. Quite the opposite. I am eager to learn more about it. I’m like my students in that way. In a learning process, picking people’s brains, researching, experimenting, getting it all wrong, getting it right sometimes too! What I like about my job is the creative side of it. Creating new activities, new games, not just using the same old resources. I see in the new media a large space given to creativity.

Some of my short term plans: start my year 12/13 lessons with news from TV5 or Radio France Internationale online. Get my student to chat with French speaking teenagers. Use all the interactive sites I have already found on the Internet. Show the students that they have access to a large amount of things on the web. And so much more…..

Thanks Mr Grimshaw for once again a very inspiring workshop!