The Future of Education

The advent of technology in the 21st century has changed most of the traditional educational practices, especially the way tools and materials used to support and enhance learning and instruction. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud computing proves to be a highly efficient technology which tends to be integrated into EFL (English as Foreign Language) instruction and makes both teachers and students benefit a lot. Therefore, the cloud computing method in teaching languages could be very challenging and motivating because students learn language faster by speaking and engaging with others as well as they learn how to write and read. Cloud computing is one of new and promising computing resources in the 21st century. “Cloud computing refers to the large scale distributed computing paradigm … in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet” (Foster, Zhao, Raicu & Lu, 2009). Some typical examples are blogging, wikis, google and podcasting.

This presentation will draw a picture of various cloud-based technologies (blogging, wiki, google and podcasting) being incorporated in the EFL classes and the benefits and challenges of each tool will be  discussed. Furthermore, strategies and activities of integrating cloud-based applications will be  presented in this presentation.

Key words: cloud-computing, EFL, internet, language learning