Improving creativity through ICTs

Creativity is a quality teachers should have with or without using ICTs. The reality we as language teachers face every day is that everything is done but nothing is done in language education. When we start exploring the wonderful world of ICTs, we can realize that many sources have been created for us. Everything is there: prezi, slideshare, pearltrees, multiple web sites, facebook, blogs, movie maker, youtube, skype, an uncountable sources we might not have explored. However, this is not the interesting part; the interesting side of all this is the challenge that all those sources present to us, as teachers. Everything is to be done with them.

Being a language teacher in the past required to have a lot of skills: using the board, drawing pictures, imitate, show colorful material to students, find different ways to have them interact with each other, were some of the activities teachers had to do to make their students learn. This does not mean, however, that we do not have to do this nowadays; but the real fact is that we have mutiple ways to explore our creativity by using ICTs now. All the available sources could become useless if we do not use them properly. What does "use them properly" mean? Use them with a clear purpose, no matter what this purpose is.

A clear purpose is paramount. Even if we do not have access to technological resources, we need to have a clear purpose anyway. But if we have access to this "magic" world of ICTs, let's not miss the opportunity to learn from them and improve our creativity differently. This means that we are open minded and willing to learn anything that benefits our students and ourselves.

What does learning imply?

What does learning involve? How long do people take to learn something? We as teachers are learners and have had the role of students many times in our lives, so we should know the answer to this question. However, sometimes we act as if we had no idea about this. We tend to forget that this interpsychological dialogue we have in the first face of the learning process, followed by the intrapsychological dialogue, and finally the exteriorization of that information we have been given, but reorganized as learning, can take a long time; months, years. We do this when we expect too much from our students, when we expect great results without having provided an appropriate input, when we believe that just because we said it or explained it once, they learnt it.

Students usually trust us because we are supposed to be the ones who  "know", the ones who can make their learning posible, then our responsibility is high. If we are clear about what learning implies, we should be the appropiate mediators to make it posible. We should never forget the importance of that third phase in the learning process because when students come to this phase, they have the possibility to show what they have really learned. This means that our students should always know that even if mediation is important, they are the ones who finally structure their knowledge and do something with it. Our duty on the other hand, is to stop thinking that just covering the topics of the syllabus is enough.

The ICTs become very good means, but not the only ones, to perform this third phase. The web 2.0 has made interaction possible, a fundamental process in the appropiation of knowledge. When we have clear intentions or purposes, the means to exteriorize and show knowledge can be very varied. The most important is to focus our interests on learning.