Ray Davila's guest appearances

Ray Davila

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

John Hughes

Mark Hancock

Steve Walsh

Brian Tomlinson

Michael McCarthy

Matthew Turner

Jason Anderson

David Tait

Jonathan Newton

George Pickering

Andrew Wright

Stephen krashen

Paul Thompson

Thomas Guskey

Michael Epstein

OwlTail

We talk about what gets neglected instead of technology (where did the budget for those interactive whiteboards come from anyway?!), the effects on how teachers are assessed and evaluated and if technology might eliminate the need to learn a language altogether in the near future…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our podcast. Today, we have the second part of our conversation "Technology in Classroom: Fact or Future in Education." We have Ray...Ross Thorburn: Davila. [laughs]Tracy: Hi, Ross. Welcome back.Ray Davila: Good to be back, guys. [laughs]Ross Thorburn: If you hadn't listened to the first part, go back and check out last week's episode where we talked about the advantages of technology in education. This episode, we're going to talk about the disadvantages.Ross: I'm going to kick things off and say that one of the biggest problems with technology is just overuse and over‑reliance on it. Just to pick a really simple example is what we called interactive whiteboards.There's so many things you cannot do on them, you can just do with a traditional whiteboard, and companies that I've worked for, that will remain nameless, invested far more in putting interactive whiteboards in the classroom than putting qualified teachers in the classroom.Ray: I'm going to agree with you on this one. It's an over‑reliance on education institutions as well of using technology as a gimmick. There is this lack of this human aspect that I can't miss. One of the things that I remember in the school was there was these moments where you could have technology not working.The Internet is not working or the printer is not working.Ray: I liked to look at those as opportunities. Opportunities where teachers are going into a class, somewhat unplugged, and just trying to find alternatives. A lot of times, I remember a lot of teachers giving feedback and saying that class actually went really well.Ross: To go back to what you're saying earlier, Ray, it's almost like some companies try to use technology to teacher‑proof education. It's like, it doesn't matter if you had a good teacher or rubbish teacher, we've got technology, computers, and algorithms. We're going to make sure everyone's going to learn, so we don't really have to worry so much about recruiting good teachers.Tracy: If you're talking about your best teacher, everybody have different choices, have a different reason why chose that teacher, and they have their own characteristics.Ray: That was something that I had an issue with last week's discussion about the advantages of technology in how you had mentioned the facial recognition. Facial recognition being used in a manner that where you can use it to detect things like the student talking time, even things like their participation in the class, or correct usage of vocabulary or grammar or pronunciation.Even to the point of as a way of detecting the student's mood and their level of attention. One thing we need to be careful of, making sure that we're not reducing that human element in the learning process to something that's just a mere algorithm. I think that there are other elements to a student than just points on their face to measure their mood.Tracy: I totally agree.Ross: That's the other danger with that is that if that's what you can measure, then that's the thing that people will pay attention to. It's like the old saying, what gets measured gets managed. Make sure you measure the right thing. Therefore, you can do these measures, student talking time and how often the student smiled, then guess what? The teachers are going to be encouraged to do in class.Tracy: These are something supplementary that maybe can help you to find out more information about the learning process, but it shouldn't be the tool to determine if that's a good teacher or that's a bad class. Something like that. That's really dangerous to judge something based on that.Ross: Another issue with this is that, with not just facial recognition but with so much stuff being on camera now, I think they're truly going to put people off experimenting in the class and trying things that, maybe this is going to work, maybe this is going to be disaster but hey, who cares? I'll try it.If everything you do is on camera and can be watched back by parents or students, and used as evidence that you're incompetent, I'm probably just going to stick more to what I've been told to do, or play it safe, rather than try things that would challenge their status quo.Ross: What do you guys think about this idea that maybe within a few years' time language learning will be pointless? At the moment, we have pretty good translation stuff. Google, YouTube can do it fairly accurately for free. Subtitles, automatically, you can go from speech to text. You can go from text of another language to text of another language.For quite a long time, maybe for about 20 years, we've been able to get computers that read stuff out loud. It doesn't seem to be a huge leap from where we are now, to me being able to speak on the phone, just like in "Star Trek," and it comes out in a different language. Can you see that changing language learning?Just being like, "Why would I spend 10, or 15 years, or 20 years, or just the rest of my life working and learning another language when I can just download an app?"Ray: Now, just from the press of a button, we can get everything done, rather than us actually having to put in a lot of work. The work, it's the trial and error. It's the process that really helps with the learning process. If we are eliminating that for convenience' sake, then technology could very well make ESL obsolete.Tracy: There are people, probably, difficult for them to learn new language. I'm thinking from my mom's age. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be very challenging for them, and they will say, "What's the point for me? I'm Asian trying so hard learning a new language, but I only use it occasionally."On the other hand, I'm not sure the accuracy in everything is it really, especially that's something you would like to express? I'm thinking how can the translator 100 percent interpret your feeling, your emotion, and how you'd like to say that in what kind of tone of voice. It's always going to be so different.For example, English, if you say something, was the tone going up or going down, that's probably means different things in particular context. That's something that would be quite interesting to see if it's going to bring a lot of convenience or a lot of trouble [laughs] for people.Ross: What my personal prediction for this is it is going to affect language learning for adults, but I don't think it's going to affect language learning for kids so much. I was thinking about this. Most of the subjects that we learn in school are not very useful, right?Biology, or physics, or history. You could just google any of those things that you spend all that time at school studying. I think that whatever the point of education at school is, it's often not really that we memorize all this knowledge and we use it in our later lives.The same is probably true of language learning. It will stay in state schools because for the same reason everything else is there. It's just that it's always been there.I can see for adults if thinking about I'm not going to spend all this money on a language course to help me in this particular situation? Maybe if I could just download an app. Maybe it's not actually worth it because there is an easier way out.Ray: I think for sure that one of the things that happens with new things in innovations in this course of it being developed, this is the new fad. Everyone is talking about tech and how we can utilize it in a bunch of different things.The problem is, that sometimes we need to sit back and just reflect, analyze its impact overall on the industry, on the students themselves. I think that, again, it goes back into things that are also important in the learning process like social skills, learning how to be a team player. These things are we considering how we're going to implement and teach these soft skills in the process?Or are we just focusing a lot on how students can win and how we can entertain them? A lot of times we are trying to create new experiences of creating a new reality, a digital reality. I wonder the long‑term effects it might have on how people associate with each other in reality. If we are focusing so much on a digital world, what happens to the real world?Ross: The big issue here with technology is not that it's bad but just that where it fits in this so‑called ladder of love. How important is it compared to other things, like human connection, or teacher training, or teaching the right syllabus, or making sure that your syllabus has authentic language or any of those other things?The danger with all of the things that we've been talking about or we're talking about the previous episode is yeah, overuse, over prioritization. More money and time gets invested in the technology than in any number of other things that we might prioritize over technology.Ray: The thing that we haven't really touched about, either in this podcast or in the one before, was is technology and its use with teacher training itself. I wondered, again, especially with older teachers, is some of them are just not as comfortable and confident with technology, and how that's going to play a role in the future.Will, we just have to sift out all of the teachers who aren't computer literate and competent with technology, or is it going to be something where knowledge in technology is more important than language knowledge?Ross: That's an interesting point. I remember watching, when I was a Director of Studies, watching a new teacher. This guy, he must have been 15 years older than me. Watching him with a class of 16 seven‑year‑olds. This guy was trying to turn on and calibrate an interactive live port. It's pandemonium breaking out behind him.There was one little boy who was trying to tell him what to do. He was like, "Shut up. Sit in your seat." That added nothing to that person's class.When it comes to any kind of materials, a key principle is to make sure that you're always adding something to everyone's class, and you're never really taking things away. With those things that are difficult to use, you're really just creating more of a burden, some sort of cognitive overload, perhaps, for some, if not a lot of teachers.Teaching is already multi‑tasking where you're thinking about, "Oh, do I have enough time? Should I end this activity in a few moments? Have I met the aims of this lesson?" All those things.As soon as you add in some of the clunky technology, perhaps, you're just making the teacher's job even more complicated. Obviously, as soon as you do that, you're distracting the teacher from the other things that they could be doing where it should be helping the students even more.Ray: I know a few teachers, then other people who have confessed that they have failed their practical blocks because of technology going awry and it's just...Ross: Can I just say, as a former diploma assessor,. I don't think I ever saw anyone fail a class because technology went wrong.[laughter]Ray: I think it's not the technology went wrong, but because they invested so much of their lesson to that, and because it didn't work.Ross: That's almost a nice micro cause, isn't it?[laughter]Ross: It's all conversation, Ray, right? Those people made the mistake of investing all of their effort into technology and it didn't do what they expected it to do. Maybe that's the overall danger with the industry. We're in danger of investing too much time and resources into something that might work, but maybe it might not work as well.Ray: I think it was Voltaire who once said something that stuck with me. It was, "If you do not accept the changes of your time, perhaps you will miss the greatest part."I think that, to a certain extent, one of the things that we should be aware of is that technology is happening, whether we like it or not. That development is a part of culture. It's part of society at this point. We might as well just start seeing how we can utilize it and take the advantages, and try to make the best of it.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening to these two podcasts. Thanks very much, Ross, on our podcast.Ray: Of course. It was my pleasure. [laughs]Tracy: See you guys. Bye.Ross: Thanks, everyone. Bye‑bye.

We talk about what gets neglected instead of technology (where did the budget for those interactive whiteboards come from anyway?!), the effects on how teachers are assessed and evaluated and if technology might eliminate the need to learn a language altogether in the near future…<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our podcast. Today, we have the second part of our conversation "Technology in Classroom: Fact or Future in Education." We have Ray...Ross Thorburn: Davila. [laughs]Tracy: Hi, Ross. Welcome back.Ray Davila: Good to be back, guys. [laughs]Ross Thorburn: If you hadn't listened to the first part, go back and check out last week's episode where we talked about the advantages of technology in education. This episode, we're going to talk about the disadvantages.Ross: I'm going to kick things off and say that one of the biggest problems with technology is just overuse and over‑reliance on it. Just to pick a really simple example is what we called interactive whiteboards.There's so many things you cannot do on them, you can just do with a traditional whiteboard, and companies that I've worked for, that will remain nameless, invested far more in putting interactive whiteboards in the classroom than putting qualified teachers in the classroom.Ray: I'm going to agree with you on this one. It's an over‑reliance on education institutions as well of using technology as a gimmick. There is this lack of this human aspect that I can't miss. One of the things that I remember in the school was there was these moments where you could have technology not working.The Internet is not working or the printer is not working.Ray: I liked to look at those as opportunities. Opportunities where teachers are going into a class, somewhat unplugged, and just trying to find alternatives. A lot of times, I remember a lot of teachers giving feedback and saying that class actually went really well.Ross: To go back to what you're saying earlier, Ray, it's almost like some companies try to use technology to teacher‑proof education. It's like, it doesn't matter if you had a good teacher or rubbish teacher, we've got technology, computers, and algorithms. We're going to make sure everyone's going to learn, so we don't really have to worry so much about recruiting good teachers.Tracy: If you're talking about your best teacher, everybody have different choices, have a different reason why chose that teacher, and they have their own characteristics.Ray: That was something that I had an issue with last week's discussion about the advantages of technology in how you had mentioned the facial recognition. Facial recognition being used in a manner that where you can use it to detect things like the student talking time, even things like their participation in the class, or correct usage of vocabulary or grammar or pronunciation.Even to the point of as a way of detecting the student's mood and their level of attention. One thing we need to be careful of, making sure that we're not reducing that human element in the learning process to something that's just a mere algorithm. I think that there are other elements to a student than just points on their face to measure their mood.Tracy: I totally agree.Ross: That's the other danger with that is that if that's what you can measure, then that's the thing that people will pay attention to. It's like the old saying, what gets measured gets managed. Make sure you measure the right thing. Therefore, you can do these measures, student talking time and how often the student smiled, then guess what? The teachers are going to be encouraged to do in class.Tracy: These are something supplementary that maybe can help you to find out more information about the learning process, but it shouldn't be the tool to determine if that's a good teacher or that's a bad class. Something like that. That's really dangerous to judge something based on that.Ross: Another issue with this is that, with not just facial recognition but with so much stuff being on camera now, I think they're truly going to put people off experimenting in the class and trying things that, maybe this is going to work, maybe this is going to be disaster but hey, who cares? I'll try it.If everything you do is on camera and can be watched back by parents or students, and used as evidence that you're incompetent, I'm probably just going to stick more to what I've been told to do, or play it safe, rather than try things that would challenge their status quo.Ross: What do you guys think about this idea that maybe within a few years' time language learning will be pointless? At the moment, we have pretty good translation stuff. Google, YouTube can do it fairly accurately for free. Subtitles, automatically, you can go from speech to text. You can go from text of another language to text of another language.For quite a long time, maybe for about 20 years, we've been able to get computers that read stuff out loud. It doesn't seem to be a huge leap from where we are now, to me being able to speak on the phone, just like in "Star Trek," and it comes out in a different language. Can you see that changing language learning?Just being like, "Why would I spend 10, or 15 years, or 20 years, or just the rest of my life working and learning another language when I can just download an app?"Ray: Now, just from the press of a button, we can get everything done, rather than us actually having to put in a lot of work. The work, it's the trial and error. It's the process that really helps with the learning process. If we are eliminating that for convenience' sake, then technology could very well make ESL obsolete.Tracy: There are people, probably, difficult for them to learn new language. I'm thinking from my mom's age. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be very challenging for them, and they will say, "What's the point for me? I'm Asian trying so hard learning a new language, but I only use it occasionally."On the other hand, I'm not sure the accuracy in everything is it really, especially that's something you would like to express? I'm thinking how can the translator 100 percent interpret your feeling, your emotion, and how you'd like to say that in what kind of tone of voice. It's always going to be so different.For example, English, if you say something, was the tone going up or going down, that's probably means different things in particular context. That's something that would be quite interesting to see if it's going to bring a lot of convenience or a lot of trouble [laughs] for people.Ross: What my personal prediction for this is it is going to affect language learning for adults, but I don't think it's going to affect language learning for kids so much. I was thinking about this. Most of the subjects that we learn in school are not very useful, right?Biology, or physics, or history. You could just google any of those things that you spend all that time at school studying. I think that whatever the point of education at school is, it's often not really that we memorize all this knowledge and we use it in our later lives.The same is probably true of language learning. It will stay in state schools because for the same reason everything else is there. It's just that it's always been there.I can see for adults if thinking about I'm not going to spend all this money on a language course to help me in this particular situation? Maybe if I could just download an app. Maybe it's not actually worth it because there is an easier way out.Ray: I think for sure that one of the things that happens with new things in innovations in this course of it being developed, this is the new fad. Everyone is talking about tech and how we can utilize it in a bunch of different things.The problem is, that sometimes we need to sit back and just reflect, analyze its impact overall on the industry, on the students themselves. I think that, again, it goes back into things that are also important in the learning process like social skills, learning how to be a team player. These things are we considering how we're going to implement and teach these soft skills in the process?Or are we just focusing a lot on how students can win and how we can entertain them? A lot of times we are trying to create new experiences of creating a new reality, a digital reality. I wonder the long‑term effects it might have on how people associate with each other in reality. If we are focusing so much on a digital world, what happens to the real world?Ross: The big issue here with technology is not that it's bad but just that where it fits in this so‑called ladder of love. How important is it compared to other things, like human connection, or teacher training, or teaching the right syllabus, or making sure that your syllabus has authentic language or any of those other things?The danger with all of the things that we've been talking about or we're talking about the previous episode is yeah, overuse, over prioritization. More money and time gets invested in the technology than in any number of other things that we might prioritize over technology.Ray: The thing that we haven't really touched about, either in this podcast or in the one before, was is technology and its use with teacher training itself. I wondered, again, especially with older teachers, is some of them are just not as comfortable and confident with technology, and how that's going to play a role in the future.Will, we just have to sift out all of the teachers who aren't computer literate and competent with technology, or is it going to be something where knowledge in technology is more important than language knowledge?Ross: That's an interesting point. I remember watching, when I was a Director of Studies, watching a new teacher. This guy, he must have been 15 years older than me. Watching him with a class of 16 seven‑year‑olds. This guy was trying to turn on and calibrate an interactive live port. It's pandemonium breaking out behind him.There was one little boy who was trying to tell him what to do. He was like, "Shut up. Sit in your seat." That added nothing to that person's class.When it comes to any kind of materials, a key principle is to make sure that you're always adding something to everyone's class, and you're never really taking things away. With those things that are difficult to use, you're really just creating more of a burden, some sort of cognitive overload, perhaps, for some, if not a lot of teachers.Teaching is already multi‑tasking where you're thinking about, "Oh, do I have enough time? Should I end this activity in a few moments? Have I met the aims of this lesson?" All those things.As soon as you add in some of the clunky technology, perhaps, you're just making the teacher's job even more complicated. Obviously, as soon as you do that, you're distracting the teacher from the other things that they could be doing where it should be helping the students even more.Ray: I know a few teachers, then other people who have confessed that they have failed their practical blocks because of technology going awry and it's just...Ross: Can I just say, as a former diploma assessor,. I don't think I ever saw anyone fail a class because technology went wrong.[laughter]Ray: I think it's not the technology went wrong, but because they invested so much of their lesson to that, and because it didn't work.Ross: That's almost a nice micro cause, isn't it?[laughter]Ross: It's all conversation, Ray, right? Those people made the mistake of investing all of their effort into technology and it didn't do what they expected it to do. Maybe that's the overall danger with the industry. We're in danger of investing too much time and resources into something that might work, but maybe it might not work as well.Ray: I think it was Voltaire who once said something that stuck with me. It was, "If you do not accept the changes of your time, perhaps you will miss the greatest part."I think that, to a certain extent, one of the things that we should be aware of is that technology is happening, whether we like it or not. That development is a part of culture. It's part of society at this point. We might as well just start seeing how we can utilize it and take the advantages, and try to make the best of it.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening to these two podcasts. Thanks very much, Ross, on our podcast.Ray: Of course. It was my pleasure. [laughs]Tracy: See you guys. Bye.Ross: Thanks, everyone. Bye‑bye.

Technology in Language Education Part II - Fad? (with Ray Davila)

In the first of two parts, we discuss all that is good about technology, before being as cynical as possible in part two.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have our friend on again.Tracy: Ray.Ross: Davila.Tracy: Davila.dRay Davila: Hi, guys.Ross: Ray, you've switched jobs since last time. Do you want to tell us what you're doing now?Ray: Oh yeah! I'm currently a development editor working in product development. I look at the academic quality of lesson plans, educational books, songs, movies, and seeing how they can be implemented as materials in lesson plans.Ross: If I'm not incorrect the name of the department you work for is called Ed Tech. Is it?Ray: Yes, yes.Ross: I thought that was so interesting. An education company. That's the name for the team that makes the teaching materials.Ray: We're trying to focus a little bit more on how we can use technology in the learning process.Ross: This week we're going to try something that I don't think...I remember we've only did it once before which is to do like a two‑parter. The first half, we're going to talk about some of the advantages of technology in English language education. Then in the second part of the podcast, next episode, we'll talk about some of the disadvantages.Ray, you had a catchy name for this that you've thought of, right?Ray: Oh yeah. It's something like, technology in the classroom, fad or future in education?Ross: Well done. That's...Tracy: That's a great name.Ross: You make [inaudible: 1:46] .[laughter][music]Ross: I guess all of us use technology quite a bit. Tracy and I have worked, at least, for the last year in online teaching, mainly and used technology. What are some of the benefits you guys think of technology in education?Tracy: The first thing I would say is fascinating actually you have a lot of class recordings, and you can definitely go back and watch those lessons. Either you are doing material development, you are focusing on like a teacher training or even just the teacher themselves. They can go back and see which area really what tallies in my class and which one didn't.It's definitely big advantage for having the technology in the classroom because either really in the traditional offline classes, I think it's quite difficult for people to do that.Ross: I presume it's the same. Maybe it's also true for the students, that students might be able to use that technology. Not quite now, I'm not sure if we're on that stage yet. In future, presumably, soon have the ability to literally listen back to what you were saying in class three months ago or six months ago and compare that with what you are doing now.It seem to be very objective way of helping students visualize or see what their progress has been.Ray: Using or having those recordings are also a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at things that we would never have realized it could be a potential issue in our teaching or in just the students learning and just having that as a tool to reflect on. Or even I think that for teachers of young learners, it's also something they can use when they're sitting down with the parents.Tracy: I also wanted to mention something, at least in China, I think a lot of public schools from what I heard, like my university classmates and they're teaching in public school how they assign homework. They don't really use the way that when we were in school anymore. I think they also having like an app.You can log in, then you can see the homework, you can do that, and you can submit it. The teacher can check your homework or provide you the answers or suggested answers to compare with. Everything will be tracked in the app or maybe some other programs.I think that's a massive change because when I was a teacher in public school, you really have to check every single student's homework book. I needed to take them back home sometimes, and it's really heavy, but now...[laughter]Tracy: ...it's really light, you just need a phone or you need a pad, and you can just do all of this work.Ross: I think here we're getting into the idea as well of personalizing things very easily that if you have technology you can personalize things a little more easily for your students. That you could give, for example, quite easily every student individual homework, individual exercises. You can have algorithms to make sure that you figure out where people are struggling, and what they're advantages and disadvantages are.I think really it has that opportunity to individualize learning and get everything just to the right level where you're helping everyone learn because I think ultimately that's one of the most important things in education, is figuring out where your students are, and then teaching them accordingly. I think technology can help with both sides of that equation.Tracy: Yeah.Ray: Personalization, is a huge thing. You were mentioning one of the main things with algorithms. How you can, example, giving a test or giving homework, and then that can for you, instead of the teacher doing it, it can assess what a student is having difficulty with.Then from there, it could suggest other alternatives, more activities for them to do in a particular grammar points or them being able to do this.I think that one of the things about how this benefits education is that, yes, we have personalization, but then at the same time we have a lack at the moment of educational professionals currently at the disposal of helping students to get to where they need to be.Maybe either because there's just a lack of resources, there are not as many instructors as there were before. Also, there are not as many instructors with as much experience or as much passion as there were before. I think that now, we're turning toward technology where it's picking up the slack. I think that we, on the human end, we've fallen a little bit short.Ross: Not just that. Also, it can help you get resources to places where those resources are lacking. For example, if you're in a highly developed western country it is easy to get access to probably a good education. If you're not, then it's more difficult. It really depends on where you are in the world.Technology, I think, at least, all online classes and things you can now have probably a class with just about a teacher anywhere in the world, that's one thing. The other thing that it does is there's so much access to...If we're talking about English, English now, like any students can go on to YouTube or to read newspapers or whatever.I remember even as a new teacher back in 2006, how difficult it was just to get a newspaper clipping or something and photocopy that for your students, but just think now there's so much English out there.[music]Tracy: Recent years we're talking about 21st century skills. I think technology is great platform to provide people these chances to explore the culture differences and that also the soft skills is not just about critical thinking, but also being more tolerant, to understand other people, beliefs, religion.That's a great way actually to make sure our students or people, they have the opportunity to have a chance to open their mind.Ross: I definitely feel that about online classes. It's amazing that you can pull a lot of people in America, Britain, wherever, they actually know people in China, right? When they see China in the news, whatever, they're not just immediately thinking something negative about it. They have some understanding and some relationship with some students here.It's the same for children here with teachers abroad and obviously, that cause across in a hundred different countries to probably hundreds of thousands of different people that there's all this extra understanding. In this current era that we're in of nationalism, it's developed maybe over the last decade or so but that's a really wonderful thing.Ray: I think that's just it. That language learning, big language learning classroom, is not just about communication. It's about also cultural awareness. We can have a platform where a student in one country, in South America being in the same classroom virtually with a student from Asia. It's part of that age of globalization.Tracy: We've been talking about this in this podcast for a film, and it's ready, but I still think not really many people, for example, like the parents, they are aware of this. It's not just a way for your kid to learn a language is just like...Yeah, changing their mindset, their beliefs and also how they view the world, view people.These are a lot of soft skills where it's quite difficult to evaluate from the parents who are maybe these teachers or schools. It's very difficult for them to evaluate, to see the result because that's the long‑term goal or long‑term results.I also think that technology for teaching lately, the massive topic is about AI or AR. Having an AI teacher, there are a lot of debate and discussion about it. Do you think that AI teachers is going to replace a real teacher? There's something really interesting about AI because they definitely can track or catch the student's behavior sometimes.I remember I went to a conference, and they were actually showing on the screen there were maybe 40 students, and each student, AI technology can catch everyone's facial expression, and it also gives a report about the student's talk time in this class. It probably can help you see the student interaction.Also, I don't know, based on the temperature or something, and see how much they are mentally evolving in this learning process. These things are so difficult to see from the surface level and just judging from how they look like. I think that AI, all this technology they can help us to analyze this.Ray: It's funny that you've mentioned AR. I recently came back from Macau where I participated in a little VR thing.[laughter]Ray: I don't even know what to call it. Pretty much we have these harnesses on with headphones, helmet with goggles and stuff. We were put into a room. That was not very big. It was very, very bare. There was nothing in it. It was just like a concrete floor, concert wall. There was nothing inside except for a handful of us. There were like eight of us.Then we were told to put on our goggles, put on our headphones, and then we have like this gun. Out of nowhere, we were in an entirely new world. We had to walk around in this world. We were walking around, we had to shoot robots, and things like that.I just remember my heart pounding when we were doing certain things like having to cross this crosswalk which obviously your brain knows that we know that we're in a concrete room. For some reason, my mind was playing tricks with me. Out of nowhere, I was refusing to go over this crosswalk because I was looking down, it was stories up and my actual legs were shaking.It's this amazing...It was the first time I ever realized that our minds can have such an impact on the way our body reacts, the way that we think in general. Most people know what VR is but AR, I don't know if many people are quite familiar with AR.Ross: Can we pause you there for a second?Ray: Oh sorry, yes.Ross: That's an amazing story. This is huge potential there, isn't there? In a class of like, "Yeah, you pretend to be the shopkeeper. You pretend to be this person." Stick on your goggles. No, let's pretend we're in a restaurant. It's like boom! You're in a restaurant or something much more interesting than being in a restaurant.Tracy: One of my favorite activity actually using the AR technology it's quite similar to the selfie app. The students, they can really try to be another character. Like if now I'm just having a conversation asking for directions in a foreign country, and then they probably can change how they look. Now, I try to be an old person, and that's how they look.Also, on the flight, I try to be the passenger, and the flight attendant having a conversation. It's just so interesting. You can see their face it's actually replacing on the screen. The student's face is actually there. They can feel they're in that context.Ross: You think about how much of language learning is role plays and pretending to be people in certain situations? Obviously, the more I think we do in general in class to help students understand those situation through setting context, moving the seats around, and bringing in props, the better. Obviously, what we're talking about just takes that to another level entirely.[music]Ross: Tune in again next time, and we will talk about the disadvantages of technology.Tracy: Thank you for listening.Ross: Thanks, Ray. We'll see you next week.[laughter]Tracy: See you soon.Ray: See you, guys.Tracy: Bye.

In the first of two parts, we discuss all that is good about technology, before being as cynical as possible in part two.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have our friend on again.Tracy: Ray.Ross: Davila.Tracy: Davila.dRay Davila: Hi, guys.Ross: Ray, you've switched jobs since last time. Do you want to tell us what you're doing now?Ray: Oh yeah! I'm currently a development editor working in product development. I look at the academic quality of lesson plans, educational books, songs, movies, and seeing how they can be implemented as materials in lesson plans.Ross: If I'm not incorrect the name of the department you work for is called Ed Tech. Is it?Ray: Yes, yes.Ross: I thought that was so interesting. An education company. That's the name for the team that makes the teaching materials.Ray: We're trying to focus a little bit more on how we can use technology in the learning process.Ross: This week we're going to try something that I don't think...I remember we've only did it once before which is to do like a two‑parter. The first half, we're going to talk about some of the advantages of technology in English language education. Then in the second part of the podcast, next episode, we'll talk about some of the disadvantages.Ray, you had a catchy name for this that you've thought of, right?Ray: Oh yeah. It's something like, technology in the classroom, fad or future in education?Ross: Well done. That's...Tracy: That's a great name.Ross: You make [inaudible: 1:46] .[laughter][music]Ross: I guess all of us use technology quite a bit. Tracy and I have worked, at least, for the last year in online teaching, mainly and used technology. What are some of the benefits you guys think of technology in education?Tracy: The first thing I would say is fascinating actually you have a lot of class recordings, and you can definitely go back and watch those lessons. Either you are doing material development, you are focusing on like a teacher training or even just the teacher themselves. They can go back and see which area really what tallies in my class and which one didn't.It's definitely big advantage for having the technology in the classroom because either really in the traditional offline classes, I think it's quite difficult for people to do that.Ross: I presume it's the same. Maybe it's also true for the students, that students might be able to use that technology. Not quite now, I'm not sure if we're on that stage yet. In future, presumably, soon have the ability to literally listen back to what you were saying in class three months ago or six months ago and compare that with what you are doing now.It seem to be very objective way of helping students visualize or see what their progress has been.Ray: Using or having those recordings are also a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at things that we would never have realized it could be a potential issue in our teaching or in just the students learning and just having that as a tool to reflect on. Or even I think that for teachers of young learners, it's also something they can use when they're sitting down with the parents.Tracy: I also wanted to mention something, at least in China, I think a lot of public schools from what I heard, like my university classmates and they're teaching in public school how they assign homework. They don't really use the way that when we were in school anymore. I think they also having like an app.You can log in, then you can see the homework, you can do that, and you can submit it. The teacher can check your homework or provide you the answers or suggested answers to compare with. Everything will be tracked in the app or maybe some other programs.I think that's a massive change because when I was a teacher in public school, you really have to check every single student's homework book. I needed to take them back home sometimes, and it's really heavy, but now...[laughter]Tracy: ...it's really light, you just need a phone or you need a pad, and you can just do all of this work.Ross: I think here we're getting into the idea as well of personalizing things very easily that if you have technology you can personalize things a little more easily for your students. That you could give, for example, quite easily every student individual homework, individual exercises. You can have algorithms to make sure that you figure out where people are struggling, and what they're advantages and disadvantages are.I think really it has that opportunity to individualize learning and get everything just to the right level where you're helping everyone learn because I think ultimately that's one of the most important things in education, is figuring out where your students are, and then teaching them accordingly. I think technology can help with both sides of that equation.Tracy: Yeah.Ray: Personalization, is a huge thing. You were mentioning one of the main things with algorithms. How you can, example, giving a test or giving homework, and then that can for you, instead of the teacher doing it, it can assess what a student is having difficulty with.Then from there, it could suggest other alternatives, more activities for them to do in a particular grammar points or them being able to do this.I think that one of the things about how this benefits education is that, yes, we have personalization, but then at the same time we have a lack at the moment of educational professionals currently at the disposal of helping students to get to where they need to be.Maybe either because there's just a lack of resources, there are not as many instructors as there were before. Also, there are not as many instructors with as much experience or as much passion as there were before. I think that now, we're turning toward technology where it's picking up the slack. I think that we, on the human end, we've fallen a little bit short.Ross: Not just that. Also, it can help you get resources to places where those resources are lacking. For example, if you're in a highly developed western country it is easy to get access to probably a good education. If you're not, then it's more difficult. It really depends on where you are in the world.Technology, I think, at least, all online classes and things you can now have probably a class with just about a teacher anywhere in the world, that's one thing. The other thing that it does is there's so much access to...If we're talking about English, English now, like any students can go on to YouTube or to read newspapers or whatever.I remember even as a new teacher back in 2006, how difficult it was just to get a newspaper clipping or something and photocopy that for your students, but just think now there's so much English out there.[music]Tracy: Recent years we're talking about 21st century skills. I think technology is great platform to provide people these chances to explore the culture differences and that also the soft skills is not just about critical thinking, but also being more tolerant, to understand other people, beliefs, religion.That's a great way actually to make sure our students or people, they have the opportunity to have a chance to open their mind.Ross: I definitely feel that about online classes. It's amazing that you can pull a lot of people in America, Britain, wherever, they actually know people in China, right? When they see China in the news, whatever, they're not just immediately thinking something negative about it. They have some understanding and some relationship with some students here.It's the same for children here with teachers abroad and obviously, that cause across in a hundred different countries to probably hundreds of thousands of different people that there's all this extra understanding. In this current era that we're in of nationalism, it's developed maybe over the last decade or so but that's a really wonderful thing.Ray: I think that's just it. That language learning, big language learning classroom, is not just about communication. It's about also cultural awareness. We can have a platform where a student in one country, in South America being in the same classroom virtually with a student from Asia. It's part of that age of globalization.Tracy: We've been talking about this in this podcast for a film, and it's ready, but I still think not really many people, for example, like the parents, they are aware of this. It's not just a way for your kid to learn a language is just like...Yeah, changing their mindset, their beliefs and also how they view the world, view people.These are a lot of soft skills where it's quite difficult to evaluate from the parents who are maybe these teachers or schools. It's very difficult for them to evaluate, to see the result because that's the long‑term goal or long‑term results.I also think that technology for teaching lately, the massive topic is about AI or AR. Having an AI teacher, there are a lot of debate and discussion about it. Do you think that AI teachers is going to replace a real teacher? There's something really interesting about AI because they definitely can track or catch the student's behavior sometimes.I remember I went to a conference, and they were actually showing on the screen there were maybe 40 students, and each student, AI technology can catch everyone's facial expression, and it also gives a report about the student's talk time in this class. It probably can help you see the student interaction.Also, I don't know, based on the temperature or something, and see how much they are mentally evolving in this learning process. These things are so difficult to see from the surface level and just judging from how they look like. I think that AI, all this technology they can help us to analyze this.Ray: It's funny that you've mentioned AR. I recently came back from Macau where I participated in a little VR thing.[laughter]Ray: I don't even know what to call it. Pretty much we have these harnesses on with headphones, helmet with goggles and stuff. We were put into a room. That was not very big. It was very, very bare. There was nothing in it. It was just like a concrete floor, concert wall. There was nothing inside except for a handful of us. There were like eight of us.Then we were told to put on our goggles, put on our headphones, and then we have like this gun. Out of nowhere, we were in an entirely new world. We had to walk around in this world. We were walking around, we had to shoot robots, and things like that.I just remember my heart pounding when we were doing certain things like having to cross this crosswalk which obviously your brain knows that we know that we're in a concrete room. For some reason, my mind was playing tricks with me. Out of nowhere, I was refusing to go over this crosswalk because I was looking down, it was stories up and my actual legs were shaking.It's this amazing...It was the first time I ever realized that our minds can have such an impact on the way our body reacts, the way that we think in general. Most people know what VR is but AR, I don't know if many people are quite familiar with AR.Ross: Can we pause you there for a second?Ray: Oh sorry, yes.Ross: That's an amazing story. This is huge potential there, isn't there? In a class of like, "Yeah, you pretend to be the shopkeeper. You pretend to be this person." Stick on your goggles. No, let's pretend we're in a restaurant. It's like boom! You're in a restaurant or something much more interesting than being in a restaurant.Tracy: One of my favorite activity actually using the AR technology it's quite similar to the selfie app. The students, they can really try to be another character. Like if now I'm just having a conversation asking for directions in a foreign country, and then they probably can change how they look. Now, I try to be an old person, and that's how they look.Also, on the flight, I try to be the passenger, and the flight attendant having a conversation. It's just so interesting. You can see their face it's actually replacing on the screen. The student's face is actually there. They can feel they're in that context.Ross: You think about how much of language learning is role plays and pretending to be people in certain situations? Obviously, the more I think we do in general in class to help students understand those situation through setting context, moving the seats around, and bringing in props, the better. Obviously, what we're talking about just takes that to another level entirely.[music]Ross: Tune in again next time, and we will talk about the disadvantages of technology.Tracy: Thank you for listening.Ross: Thanks, Ray. We'll see you next week.[laughter]Tracy: See you soon.Ray: See you, guys.Tracy: Bye.

Technology in Language Education Part I - The Future? (with Ray Davila)

"Plan-teach-reflect" - everything starts from lesson planning. This episode we look at what to put in a plan, how to plan when you don't have enough time and how to make your lesson go according to plan.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel 

"Plan-teach-reflect" - everything starts from lesson planning. This episode we look at what to put in a plan, how to plan when you don't have enough time and how to make your lesson go according to plan.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>