Something interesting occurred to me today. I’ve just started a maternity cover as Language Programme Coordinator. There have been a lot of changes and the department has been under a lot of pressure to save money. Anyway, I’m just finding out the extent of this as all the magazines we used to subscribe to had been cancelled during the Summer. I was really angry and my first thoughts were: How are we meant to stay up-to-date with the developments abroard. How are we going to create good materials on current topics. Then when I thought about it I realized that I’ve hardly handed out a copy from a magazine in the past months. All the materials I’ve created for the more advanced classes have come from internet sites. A lot of the grammar sheets came from the internet or were adapted from the internet. Almost all the videos had come from the internet. In fact, when events had ocurred very recently it would have been impossible to create a lesson with authentic materials so quickly in the past. The German elections happened on Sunday. On Tuesday evening I had written news commentaries as handouts for my class. I had instant videos on my hands on all sorts of aspects of the election. In the past I’d have had to wait for a newspaper to arrive in Edinburgh which would have been a time lapse of several days. For videos I’d have had to tape news programmes and sift through these for the right clips.

So, yes, teaching has changed and some things are a lot more convenient and cheaper for the teacher. On the other hand searching for teaching materials in the Web can be very time consuming when you “lose” yourself. And just printing out things doesn’t mean they are pedagogically useful.