Techno teacher

This week's column is by Language Editor Joanna Westcombe.

Have you ever attended a lesson based around an interactive whiteboard? If you haven't, it may not be very long before you do — and whether the thing works properly or not, it will probably make an impression on you. At the IATEFL international English teaching conference this year, and in writing the cover story "What's new in the classroom?" for the July Spotlight, I found myself fascinated by how far technology has come in the last 30 years. I also found myself admiring teachers through the ages more and more for letting this beast into their classrooms.

I've told you about Mrs Robinson before. She was my formidable and formidable French teacher at school. She used to test us and re-test us and re-re-test us. She was famous, too, for her trolley. It was square, came up to her waist and carried a box under a hideous, flowery, dust-/water-/childproof plastic cover. She'd steer it down the middle of the corridor between lessons, scattering pupils left and right, some of them rubbing their heels.

And what was under that nasty cover? Yes, the tape recorder. Not a cassette recorder, but a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Remember those? I can still hear the sound of it rewinding, all the bits of French we'd just learned going backwards faster and faster until Madame Robinson put the brakes on, expertly manoeuvring to exactly the right position using two fingers of one hand while the other hand hung in mid-air, daring us to open our mouths. Can you imagine a teacher achieving that in a class of children today?

Since then, it's become much easier for teachers to use listening material in class, of course. Those small cassettes and portable recorders? — So convenient until the machine chewed up the tape just before the lesson. CDs? — Much easier to navigate, but with a habit of staying in the player at home while the empty case was taken to the lesson, or suddenly turning into the Michael Jackson CD that someone had forgotten to take out of the player.

Now teachers can put listening material on to MP3 players — smart and small. "Teacher talking time" or TTT is something that teachers are told to minimize in their lessons. But I think TTT these days stands for "teacher tapping time" — the time that the teacher spends frowning at an MP3 player and jabbing it with one finger to try to get to the next track or adjust the volume.

Some teachers avoid this by not using listening material at all, and you can begin to understand why. But it is a truly technophobic teacher who avoids the photocopier. Have you heard of PMT? You may have experienced it about once a month if you are a woman or have lived with one. But in the teaching world, it is known as "photocopier malfunction trauma", and it is highly stressful.

So spare a thought for the pioneers and early adapters such as Mme Robinson and many other teachers since, who have tamed and triumphed over technology to enhance your learning experience, only to find that, while they've been unjamming the photocopier or reloading their audio files, technology has moved on and left them behind again.

*Read Joanna's six-page article in the July Spotlight to find out what's new in the classroom today. Download the first two pages of the text. Then subscribe to Spotlight and never miss an issue!