Integrating technology into secondary English language teaching

Again, we have been working with case studies in the classroom. This time I will analyse Case Study 2.4: Mobile learning inside and outside of the classroom in Turkey, taken from Graham Stanley's Integrating technology into secondary English language teaching.

What I liked the most about this project was the variety of tools available and the fact that the students would not have been able to do anything similar to this without the use of technology. 

The idea behind the project was that students should work on vocabulary related to Animals (idioms for example) and that they should develop the 4 macroskills. The first part of the project included a visit to a zoo, during which students had to collect information, pictures, videos, sounds, that they would later use in different tasks. Then they had to use different tech tools to create a website, to present the information, and to create a comic strip in order to practice idioms. After that, they had to work on the 4 macroskills using QR codes, recording a radio play script, and using more traditional Web 2.0 tools such as online dictionaries and an online grammar quiz. 

Different parts of this project would fall into different SAMR categories. For example, the dictionary and grammar parts are Substitution activities. They could have been done on paper with the same results; the same as the treasure hunt, which surely can be more fun when played in this innovative way, but is still about going around a building and solving different tasks. The writing and listening parts would fall into Modification categories, as technology redefines the task at hand. Finally, the web and comic design activities would fall into the Redefinition category. They are tasks that would have been previously inconceivable without the use of technology. Students can share their field trip not only with their classmates but with the whole world via the web, and they can be as creative as they want to because there is no one specified format they should use.

Unfortunately, the links on the PDF file didn't work, so I was not able to browse the final product, but I found the case study really interesting, especially since it also presented the problems that the teacher had encountered and I think that it is very useful to know the potential problems of a task in order to be able to prevent them or at least be ready to solve them.