Walking Through Technology...

Ahh.. Computers.. There's no way in heck I'd live without one..

My Name is Ahmad Nazri B. Jelani and I am tech savvy.

I'm definintely no expert. I have no idea how to hack into a computer or create state of the art softwares, but I definitely know how to use the internet and explore the capabilities of my computer.

One of my hobbies on a computer is playing with Photoshop, editting pictures, drawing cartoon characters and other photoshop-ish things.

I even know how to make a website. In fact, I had my own Dragonball Z fan site when I was 12 years old where I would upload images and video clips from the show. But I had to stop because I couldn't pay for the webspace that hosted my website. Today I just write blogs because it's the easiest way to have a website of my own.

Other than that, quite a light gamer. I play quite a number of games per year. But I've only started two years ago. I don't know how to create my own game, but I've had an experience making one once before. I used a software call "Cookie" if I'm not mistaken. However, I never developed from there. I mostly like to with hardware like the graphiccards and upgrading my PC to be able to support much heavier games with more detailed graphics.

I use to live in the USA and I went to a Charter school. It's call the Centre Learning Community (CLC) charter school. This school fully utilizes the internet in their curriculum instructions. I remember that while I was there, I did a lot of mathematics exercises using a software. You'll only advance to the next topic if you are able to achieve above a certain score. Not only that, for other subjects as well, we posted all of our assignments on the internet.

During my practicum, I rarely got to use technology in the class. The school didn't have the sufficient facilities. However, I did manage to get a chance to use technology once or twice and gave a powerpoint presentation. The presentation was definitely a success because it got the students attention. I also played several video clips to get the students thinking process started.

I believe that using technology in language teaching is very affective. Children nowadays are so used to technology such as the television. Because their already familiar with technology, they can easily use it to learn language. However, isolated language learning is never affective. The students must be able to use the language in the real world. That's where the teacher comes into effect. By letting the students use the language through games in class, they can further gain more input and improve their proficiency in the tartget language. There may be a day when an advanced AI is created to perfectly achieve this so the students won't need to meet actual people to acquire the language.