Walton Burns: What's a Word Processor, Teacher?

Room AVALON

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While technology has opened up new worlds of learning for ELLs, some students may be sitting down at a computer for the first time in your classroom. I’ve had students who typed essays in their email and who didn’t know that you could save documents on a computer! Before students can really take advantage of the world wide web, it’s nice for them to know how to open an attachment or bold some text. In this presentation, I will share some activities and games I use to let students learn basic computer skills such as saving and opening files, practice typing, and to teach text formatting. A lot of these skills are transferable to other programs, such as blogs and chat forums, as text formatting symbols are becoming more universal. The techniques I will present could also be adapted to teach HTML or other more complex computer skills.

I've taught English in Vanuatu, Kazakhstan, and Connecticut.My students have been Russian oil executives, Afghan high school students and Saudi princes. I currently write ESL materials and keep a blog at http://www.englishadvantage.info.