Innovation in Language Learning

Humans need to be creative. They always have. Heilman (2016) states that there are many reasons that explain why creativity is important for society. He reminds us that humans have always wanted to control nature and have struggled to develop their creative skills to do so. Without creativity civilization might not have progressed neither, perhaps, reasoning processes (Young, 2013).

We are creative just because we exist. We create every single second of our lives. Anything we do, anything we believe changes our world immediately. This is quite clear in writing, because we interpret the world through our mind and then through our words. At present, students need to be able to write in different contexts, reacting to unknown situations, explaining their viewpoints and making their ideas understood in a global context. As McVey (2008) explains, ICT has increased the amount of writing that students and teachers need to do. Our new world has made multimodal writing the norm, putting teachers and students in new situations that have to be met with creativity and good use of selected technological tools.

Teachers are expected to provide instruction to students, teach them to be creative and use technological tools. However, it is also necessary for teachers to experience the same process if they are to be successful.  In this paper I will describe how a selection of technological tools were used to empower a group of Secondary School English teachers as instructors and as writers.