Technology is part of the profession!

A 2001 survey of language teaching job postings from the past year show that 25% of all positions either mention technology as a desired skill for applicants, or actually require technology skills. Postings for ESL, which is often at the vanguard of the profession, show the highest number, at nearly 50%.

Getting Training:

  • Course opportunities on campus http://train.msu.edu
  • CLEAR (http://clear.msu.edu) at MSU offers summer workshops for language teachers. A limited number of MSU graduate students are accepted to the workshops, which are free of charge.

Core Computer Competencies: What do Language Teachers have to know, or, "would you like fries with that web page? "

    • Word Processing
      • Create a document
      • Save the document to disk
      • Open existing document from disk
      • Modify text formatting, line spacing.
      • Insert footnotes
      • Print specific pages of a document to a specific printer
    • Powerpoint
      • Create a presentation file
      • Add graphics, text formatting
      • Arrange (reorder) slides
    • AFS
      • Mount AFS space in microlab
      • Organize data on AFS space into directories/folders
      • Access AFS space off-campus via FTP
    • Email
      • Send email to specific recipient
      • Attach documents, recover attachments from incoming email
      • Send an email message to multiple recipients
    • Web
      • Access a specific URL
      • Use a search engine to locate specific information
      • Refer others to a specific URL
    • Websites
      • Create a basic web page with the following elements:
        • Text formatting
        • Images
        • Links
      • Update your website using a web page editor

Other lists:

Indiana University School of Education Prerequisite Computer Competencies
http://www.indiana.edu/~ist/comself.html

Computer Fundamentals for Teachers Computer Competency list http://www.ncat.edu/~schofed/its/cuin101/major_c.htm