How to Become a Tech-Savvy English Teacher

Veronika Walker

EDU203-01

March 5, 2010

A teacher’s most readily available source of information – and one of the key ways to relay information effectively to a tech-savvy generation – is a liberal use of the Internet. While many, including myself, regret the decline of original texts and even hard copies of material in favor of online materials, there is a general recognition that some media is necessary for today’s students, and if applied adequately, can even be of great benefit for student and teacher.

The Web offers many resources that can be useful in teaching English and literature by various methods: online articles, music and film videos, databases and tutorials, the list goes on. In this presentation, I will highlight several useful resources that I have used myself or that I intend to integrate in my lesson plans as a high school English teacher and/or college professor.

Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it has to be poor quality. There are several websites that allow teachers to create their own hub of learning for their students.

One such is WebQuest.org, which allows teachers of any discipline to quickly design classroom projects designed around a specific lesson, text, or subject.

Another helpful site, surprisingly, comes in the form of youtube.com. If I were, like this teacher, teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I might want to do a book-to-movie comparison, or even a movie-to-movie comparison. Youtube provides plenty of snippets for almost any film ever made.

Robert de Niro Frankenstein (1994)

Boris Karloff Frankenstein (1931)

Teachers can make student-driven research fun for their classes…if they know how to provide it. Using websites such as these can help the student find topics and material that interests them.

Simply CharlyWeb English TeacherPurdue’s Online Writing Lab