In my previous post, I discussed a current educational situation in Macedonia involving technology. As I wrote, that didn’t turn out to be as successful as people in charge thought it would be. But none of the potential participants ever thought it might be successful, so skepticism was born before the idea was even implemented, and that might have been the deciding point regarding this teaching failure.

I was certainly not used to technology in the educational centers, paper and pen worked best there, but nowadays, especially here at College, technology is vital to our learning advances. Try to do your homework or class/exam preparation without your computer – if nothing it is a big challenge.

And then we had the teaching class. I never imagined needing to teach kids, so I never really bothered the thought of knowing how to. I am aware how to present it to them, but even as a young student, and a small kid in middle school not so long ago, I still don’t have a good enough idea that might interest the ‘younglings’ with what I have to say. So there we have it – two challenges that I have to combine and both teach and learn something from. Technology is starting to become a necessity in education, and being technologically literate is not an advantage anymore – it’s a demand. The way I learned about technology use and implementing it towards my education was through self-teaching methods. I was interested in the time when kids my age did not need to know stuff about computers. When it became so, knowing elementary stuff about technology did not suffice, so I went ahead to the advanced part. Luckily, that is not quite necessary today, but the more ways that people know how to use technology to their full advantage – the easier the process of learning, not just about technology, but with it, becomes.

So what do I teach? Well, combined with English as a subject, technological language and usage sounds important, proper Internet appearance, abbreviations and shortcuts that help sound good and software that helps towards better writing. And now all we have to do is, explain all this to middle school kids in the best way we can. What way that is… We’ll know soon.