Learning foreign languages is becoming more important every day due to the globalization, helped by the rising of the new trends in education. There is no doubt that every professional who wants to be up-to-date in their respective field should be interested in learning foreign languages. Although the ideal thing for a person who wants to learn a new language is to do it during an exchange program, other options help exchange students to advance with their language learning process before going to the exchange program’s host country.
The combination of technological tools with knowledge in Pedagogy is known as “Edtech initiatives”. The application of these technologies aims to take better advantage of the educational process, to create and reinforce new teaching methods to facilitate the work of teachers and increase efficiency in student learning.
Educational centers of all levels have incorporated virtual platforms as a means to offer their lessons while allowing students to deliver their homework and deepen the knowledge acquired in class. Moreover, there are countries in which state-of-the-art technologies such as Virtual Reality are used within the classroom. Teachers and school leaders must keep up with these trends to ensure they provide their students with the best education possible. These are the main Edtech trends:
Curricula digitalization
New curricula will address students’ digital needs by being digitized and therefore accessible to all audiences. This way, students can acquire full knowledge about what they will learn in a specific career and how they will be able to use that information.
Data Analysis for learning customization
Data Analysis will be fundamental in the future of education, particularly to determine the satisfaction of students with different training options to meet their needs better.
Personalized training
Each action carried out by students creates data, which are used by teachers to offer the first personalized training. By knowing their pupils’ weaknesses and strengths, teachers can take action to work on the first and reaffirm the latter.
Hybrid learning
The combination between the classroom and online teaching will be increasing, as teachers will begin to take advantage of the possibilities offered by technology to offer lessons in virtual form or recommend their students to use online resources as a complement to what was learned in the classroom.
Distance education and e-learning
On the other hand, online or distance studies are a good option for those students who want to study in a certain educational institution without leaving their homes. For this reason, study centers create intranets in which teachers can leave assignments to their students, accompanied by support material, such as guides and videos, and pupils will upload such assignments to the same system, and teachers will evaluate them, all of which is done online.
Computers and mobile devices
By using computers and mobile devices, students can communicate with their teachers, classmates, and people whose mother tongue is the one they are learning, improving their communication skills. On the other hand, students can search for new words using the dictionary option on mobile phones and enrich their vocabulary. Also, they can send queries to their instructors by instant messages to quickly clarify their doubts.
Mobile applications
Likewise, there are also varieties of applications that are very useful for students who are in the process of learning a new language, because they allow them to meet and communicate with people from around the world. These are some of those apps:
HelloTalk
This app offers a system with which it’s possible to learn a new language’s grammar and pronunciation. You can also make video calls and send voice or text messages, as well as exchange pictures with other people.
Duolingo
Dualingo allows you to learn languages step by step. It contains various exercises that will teach you pronunciation as well as how to write words. The best of all is that you learn with images and games.
Wibbu
This game teaches its participants to learn English and is aimed primarily at children and young Latinos.
Voxy
This Android app helps students prepare for academic exams, such as the TOEFL test. It measures the levels of learning and progress regarding pronunciation and vocabulary.
Wlingua
It has more than 600 lessons to learn the English language at any of its levels.
Memrise
Another game that allows you to study languages such as French, German, English, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Italian. You can download it for free for basic courses, and there is also a Premium version for more advanced courses.
In short, the opportunities offered by the new trends in education are numerous. Students can conduct research and obtain resources at times that best fit their schedules, from different places and according to their needs. For Jaime Ibáñez, coordinator of the Master’s Degree in ICT Applied to Education at the National Pedagogical University, integrating technology into learning environments allows greater personalization of processes which tend to respect “individual differences regarding cognitive or learning styles. ” In addition, he affirms that technologies “promote differential and adaptive learning”, because they can adapt to situations of disability and cultural differences.
Create lifelong connections as a host family and broaden your horizons.
Many parents are concerned about their young children’s insistence on using digital devices, with which they spend a lot of screen time and “disconnect” from the real world. But actually, this demonstrates their abilities to cope with these technological devices. Is that really a bad thing?
Now we are experiencing a period of great technological development and digital transformation, in which many adults are having trouble adapting. If children from a young age show that they are doing well with technology, their parents should let them develop their skills, which will be of great help to them in the future. They could even end up being their parent’s teachers!
