Using ICT to Help Students Learn and Use English

Technology develops rapidly. It is available anywhere and for any purposes. It also provides some ease for teaching. Teachers have got some possibilities to make a good use of technology for their teaching. If I as a teacher of English subject I try to be open with this development. I try to learn how to get benefit of using technology in helping my students learn English and use their English. Based on research I find have many students comments when learning English using technology. These comments are not far from what scholars says about learning using technology. They are: making students autonomous, independent, providing choices, giving fun and enlarging students' horizon.
Sometimes activities of using technology for learning with students, however, they could be no longer new to others. My point is that trying new ways of teaching. I hope that those will make students enjoy their learning and facilitate them to learn. For this reason I want to share some of activities from my experiences when I visit some schools and teachers in there teach the students with some activities, such as :
 Using interactive software.
When it has been installed in a language laboratory. She just learn how to operate it and how can students learn using it. She duty then, just introduce the way to operate it. Then decide the target students have to achieve when learning using it. While students work with it is just monitor. Finally check their achievements.
 Asking students to explore the web to get source of learning.
After letting students learn from the text models she provide, she ask her students to find similar models from the website. It is possible to be done after she observe that there are some internet cafe surrounds. Most students are happy with this kind of task. They have to download the texts and deconstruct them.
 Asking students to submit their assignment via email
When she noticed that the ninth grade of middle school, students learn how to make an email address, she ask them to try to submit their assignments via email. She has done it since 2 years ago. She asked her students to compose a text then submit it. Nowadays, most of students use a mobile phone equipped with camera. She then asked them to make a video of themselves when they are producing monologue telling the way to do something.
 Using a software to deconstruct text
When she got the copy of this software, she still did not what she has to do with this. After trying to explore it she found that she could ask her students to use it to deconstruct texts and then reconstruct different texts. She just introduce the way to operate this software and show how to explore the icons. My research on this showed her that students have very high speed and excellent navigation on technology. It works. It shows that it helps her students in developing their competence in constructing texts.