First post

Ok, here we go.
Aknowledgment. Must admit what pushed me into this was reading a blog from an American 8th grade teacher called Blogush. One of those great guys who loves WHAT he teaches but loves even more WHO he teaches.( i.e., those faces which change every year but they are (amazingly!) real people with real problems, emotions and LIVES beyond the sacred "classroom")
Well, one of the posts was about him "not being a good writer". As may be guessed, I felt identified right away! Anyway, what he was actually saying is that after so many years of following the "rules" of the language, etc, we've grown just scared to death of making mistakes.
In fact, we language teachers have a nack for spotting mistakes everywhere, not only in our language, if I may say so...
So I thought "what the hell".
That's always a great starting point.
First of all, I must admit I am completely taken by this all this craziness of the internet and the web 2.0 and the TIC (or ICT in English). I think that everything we have been doing inside the classroom will change dramatically (it is, in fact, changing, sorry to tell you), because it is just not what our students need. It is as simple as that. We are used to "giving out" content, and that is exactly what the students have a lot of. Loads and loads of facts that can be retrieve with a click. In fact, we sometimes feel there is TOO much information, more than what we can actually handle. And it gets on our nerves when we (and now I am talking about the ADULTS, US) feel we lack the ability to choose correctly, to sieve that overwhelming amount of data.

Last year I attended a seminar by the awesome professor Claudia Ferradas de Moi. Dynamic and thought-provoking as always, she managed to open our minds and eyes into this new frightful but also challenging new world. She stated very clearly: we must not teach CONTENT, we must teach how to HANDLE and JUDGE the relevance of the content.
I do believe that the powereful people of tomorrow (of today!) will be the ones who know what to DO with the information. How do you find what you want? How can you assess its quality? How can you share it (or not)? What dangers (and opportunities) lay there in this endless virtual world where everybody sees everything?
So that's why I feel we are not doing our job if we just keep on teaching tenses and vocabulary, making them fill in GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPS (always gaps!), asking questions we all know the answers to, pretending we are "passing on" our KNOWLEDGE...
The big questions is...
WHAT DO WE DO, THEN?
Well... now you know why I called this blog THE QUEST...