MY EVOLUTION IN ELECTRONIC LITERACY

We have heard about electronic literacy, but what is it? Before all this electronic era, a literate person was someone who knew how to read and write, but now in order to be literate, you must know how to use electronic tools. Times have changed and a person who does not know how to use a computer, or does not even have an e-mail account, is consider an illiterate person. If we want to keep moving forward we must know how to use electronic tools.

The first time I met a computer I was 10 years old and I only use it to play black jack, because I did not know the other uses of a computer. Later on I started to use it for looking for pictures, videos or music that I like. I had a lot of troubles using the computers because I did not understand them, for me it was impossible to use the internet, basically because computers never caught my attention, I found them very boring, maybe that the reason that I created my e-mail account until I was in high school. I think once I started to know more about computers and internet I wanted to learn how far I could get using a computer. To use the computer, internet and more helped me to studied better and to more things that I did not know about the world.

Electronic tools have not only influence me but also help me to have better English, because most of the web pages are in this language, so if you want to understand what is publish in that page you should know English. Also I think that thanks to the internet there are a lot of web pages dedicated to the study of different languages, most of them are for learning English, and in here we can find a lot of exercises to improve our second language. Nowadays is very common to use word processors because they are easy to use, and at school the teachers often asked you to hand in your papers in computer in order to give a better presentation. But also I believe that with the invention of the internet most of the students (myself included) have become laziest, because every time we need to find something, you turn on the computer and Google it, and the first thing that comes out, we copied and paste it, and most of the times we did not know if that information is the correct one.

Every day is coming out the market new technology, and this is good because as future teachers is a good way to find different ways to teach English. We can find fun activities for the students, and with these the students will not get bored in class. One other thing we could find, is courses online or masters degrees online, this is really good because sometimes we want to keep studying, or we want to be more prepared, but for some reasons we do not have time, and with this you not necessarily must to be on a classroom with an specific schedule, so you can adapt your activities of work, family, etc; and keep your preparation as a teacher.

Nowadays a person with no access to electronic tools or any other technology is consider illiterate, and we have to accept the fact that this electronic era is going to continue, and everyday there are going to be new tools or gadgets, and we will need to learn how to use them if we want to be literates, it might be difficult but I think we can do it, we just need to know more about them and if we still do not know how to use them, then we should ask for help, the electronic era is happening, keep moving forward and do not stay in the past.