MY PERSONAL VIEW OF ICT LEARNING/TEACHING ON A CLIL COURSE.

REFLECTING ON ICT INTO THE CLIL CLASSROOM.  MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 

After more than three months following this course, my feelings about it are both positive and negative . However, I must say that the predominant feelings are positive ones.  The only negative aspect I have considered here has to do with the difficulties I found as a learner  to manage with new technologies at the beginning of the course.  But it quickly disappeared in a short period.  I had never had such technologies when I was coursing English Philology at the University of Alicante (at the beginning of this millennium!).  Fortunately, the tools, apps and web engines we have learned to use are not extremely complicated and they allow you to make mistakes and correct them before final outcome.  In exchange, they offer you a wide, easy path for the practise of any subject, doing it easier to provide contents (if you are a teacher) or to deliver the tasks you have to do (if you are a student).  I have played here both the roles of  student first and of  teacher later.  I found easier this second role, surely due to the fact that I had already reached knowledge enough to manage with the new technologies and,  why not, due also to the fact that, as a teacher, I decided which tools I used with my supposed students and which ones were not appropriate for them.  At the end, I reached to the conclusion that, once I had considered dos and don'ts, DOS win the race!.  I do not mind if it is a bit difficult to manage at first time because when you manage all this, you find an infinite range of possibilities to develop and the easiest way of sharing ideas and the like with your academic community.  It is constructive, flexible, enriching and, at the end, EASY to work with.  The traditional methods, based on books, sheets, pencil and pen were simpler and also adequate to teach/learn subjects, but they were more limited than the new digital methodologies.  All this is complemented with the structure of the CLIL methods, which are showing very good results in, for example, my field of expertise: TESL Teacher.  The problem with all these is that to apply new technologies in public schools, it would be necessary a great investment on the Educational budget from the Government "Ministerio de Educación".  It would be ideal to see that schools and High Schools are able to provide a  notebook, laptop, i-pad or the like to each student, so that printed books would not be further necessary...  Today they have began to use these technologies for the development of the subjects, but the ought to share digital devices with classmates at school, which makes everybody to lose a great amount of time:  changing placements, going to the computers classroom... If someday, each student has access to a digital equipment for him/herself, this would be the best way to develop ICT subjects based on CLIL.  Unfortunately, I  do not think it would happen in a short future.  Meanwhile, it seems a good idea that future teachers get trained on all this for possible future advances in this field.