Decalogue of a Modern Language Teacher

Don’t be afraid of new technologies; in practice they turn out be easy and intuitive and usually they work rather than don’t;

Don’t be afraid to ask more experienced teachers, IT consultants, bloggers or technology enthusiasts for help; they are usually happy to share their experience;

Enroll for a course on Computer Assisted Language Learning (like we did) or suggest organising such a course at you school or university;

If your colleague uses computers in his/her work with students suggest that they run a training for other teachers; the cost of such training will most probably be lower than the cost of an outsourced training;

You can always as your students for help; most probably they know how to solve your technical problems;

Using new technologies your students do not know you can impress them;

With new technologies you will make your life easier by creating a base of teaching materials to use in the future, you will limit the number of paper homeworks written in hard to decipher handwriting, you will engage your students in course creation, you will produce a final product of your work that can be proudly presented to your superiors, colleagues, students’ parents;

You will enrich your CV; e-learning courses are now an integral component of many traditional language courses. Information about your advanced computer literacy can raise your chances on the job market;

Try hard; you learn most by doing things;

Check Russell Stannard website on www.teachertrainingvideos.com where in short videos he shows how to use various applications in the language classroom.