Welcome to my blog!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my blog. I am excited and nervous at the prospect of having my own blog.
Over the next weeks, I plan to share my views on what we cover in class and present my views on ICT and Language Learning. I consider myself a 'digital immigrant' and I constantly strive to connect with my students, who are 'digital natives', by incorporating technology into my classes.
I am very interested in integrative CALL such as Sulis which has enabled students to connect with the topics outside of class.

This week I have been reading about the Cultura project. The Cultura project according to their website is essentially "developing understanding of another culture, a process which involves a series of stages that take an intercultural learner along a journey of discovery and reflection". This echoes the models of Byram (1997), Bennett (1998) and Kramsch (1998).

I believe that when I did the Camino de Santiago in 2003, as part of a group project from Galway, linked with a city in Galicia, Spain to explore our Celtic roots that we could have been directed by the format of the Cultura project. The online classroom setting would have enabled us to share ideas and compare and contrast issues in each country. By doing this, we could have documented our findings and stayed in contact instead of merely discussing them face-to-face.

"If today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach", as Prensky said, then we as educators, have to adapt the way that we educate, and I need to broaden my methodology to connect with my students and include CALL and ICC to enhance their linguistic and cultural learning, knowledge and understanding

My aim for this is week is to have a greater understanding of Whorf's views on Language and Thought and the models of ICC.