Exploring digital tools and their pedagogical applications

Abstract

New technologies have become an important part of our lives. Nowadays, we are surrounded by mobile phones, computers, tablets that have changed our daily habits. We check our Whatsapp every day, we can communicate via video with physically distanced people instead of only as a phone call, we use them for specific purposes with the creation of applications that meet our interests and so on and so forth. One of the fields in which technologies play a relevant role is education, and within it language learning can benefit most specially through digital tools because languages and technologies are about communication and interaction. The paper here presented is intended to explore that relationship by means of three tools (i.e. Glogster, Kahoot and Spreaker), and in particular how they can be used in a secondary school, so that technologies play in favour of language learning in this stage of education. The modality opted for with this paper is the one called “Didactic materials” following the present regulation for final projects in the Máster Universitario en Profesor/a de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanza de Idiomas. Main results of this study suggest that e-tools are interesting for secondary students, although not enough manageable for them and thus there is a need to make them more intuitive than they are, at least as far as Glogster is concerned. With another tool, Kahoot, results prove that it is more easily matching students’ needs. Therefore, it is likely that simplification in e-tools works better in high schools rather than others that require more time to learn how they work, which is the main conclusion reached comparing both of them.