We are living the digital age: CD, DVD, MP3, mobile phones and the internet now form an integral part of our everyday lives. Students come into class wired up like androids, pressing little buttons, locked into who-knows-what drumming in their ears (probably some unknown tribal band from Fiji with an online radio show!).

OK, right, let’s turn it all off and start class.

Board, textbook, talk to your partner, listen to the teacher, or if you’re lucky, sometimes a cassette are still the staple of the classroom. Their academic value has been proven beyond doubt. These fundamental classroom ingredients, used correctly, will provide the student with practice and input in all the essential language skills. Of course, this is the theory…

How often have you got your students into class – turned off the toys (which they were very interested in) and started your class. Professionally, possibly with a touch of fun, you outline the aims of the class, get the students going with a quick and active warmer… and then when it comes to the meat of the class the students have switched off! As functional as their switched off mobile phones; their memory cards inaccessible! What you did last week was forgotten today. What you do today will be forgotten by the next track on the MP3, programmed to start as soon as class finishes.

You could drill the present perfect for ½ hour, form role-plays in groups and get them to copy the grammar from the board, but this is not the language of the modern memory chip. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) Paolo Freire, the forward thinking Brazilian educationalist developed a very student-centred approach to teaching English for an uneducated class of farmers he had. One of his main hypotheses was to provide the students with the language they needed – the words for their farming tools and the language to describe the jobs they did.

The medium for many students today is the internet - even if the knowledge it provides is more sporadic, bizarre and superficial than the solidity of a book – its sheer speed and breadth are what engages the modern mind. Put your students in a computer room connected to the internet and they are instantly interested. They may not be doing what you want but they’re turned on and logged in.

It is in this area that we must develop our teaching and education – providing essential skills and language in the classroom that students need outside the classroom. Navigating the internet is an art and absorbing the information it feeds a discipline in itself. The essential ingredients of the classroom have grown and we as teachers need to grow with it. A school without an internet classroom is like a school without books. This is not to say boards, books and the classroom are redundant. Their value clearly remains, what we have is an important, modern extra ingredient.

Technology and multimedia are what our modern minds are fed. For example, the latest Cambridge exams in June included a PET reading on Pete Tong and how he uses MP3 and CD in his work as an international super-star DJ. If students are not familiar with the English jargon of Pete Tong mixing it up in clubs and on webcasts around the world they are missing out on essential modern language, culture and modes of communication that they need in their exams and beyond.

A first point to note is that a class using a website, a DVD or a track from a CD is a class using authentic materials. This is the one of the best sources of teaching material because it is real. However, it can also be a problem for the teacher because it doesn’t focus on a particular language point. Authentic materials by definition use language as a whole to communicate. This doesn’t make the material any less valid in the classroom - it just means it takes a bit more imagination to find a focus in the material.

Find your material first
It’s much easier to create a lesson around some material rather than have a language point you want to study and then trying to find the material to match it! So, how do you find your material?

Look for material which complements a theme you’ve been studying in class
For example, if you’re studying crime vocabulary maybe you could look at a couple of scenes from a crime film (thousands to choose from!!). Students could act out the scene they see, brainstorm vocabulary they hear or describe the events to a partner who hasn’t seen the scene.

Ask the students what they’re interested in
Remember you are trying to motivate your students by providing material that is relevant to their lives. Students often like English (or probably American) music. Ask the students what artists they like, get the lyrics to some of the songs from the internet and look for a theme you could exploit. Another option is to get students to make a profile and biography of a certain band by researching for information on the internet – this could be done in class or for homework. Remember! To ensure effective learning it’s vital to prohibit cutting and pasting text from the internet from the start. This lax student technique can dramatically reduce what a student learns and needs to be controlled.

Classes using the internet, movies and music are of course not a wholly new concept in teaching and there are many teachers out there using these media in the classroom. What is changing is the amount of impact these media are having in our everyday lives. The youth (and some oldies) of today spend increasing amounts of time in the digital world. Using a song in class or having an internet class has often been seen as ‘time out’ or a breather from more traditional language learning. In our modern world multimedia plays a much more central role in our lives and this should be reflected in our learning. A multimedia class should be as structured and important as any class in your curriculum. Here are some ideas on how to make your multimedia classes effective and worthwhile:

Webquests
A great way of manipulating the internet into a useful classroom activity is through a webquest. This modern activity is already a classic. It gives the student a task-based activity that, with the help and guidance of the teacher, can develop reading comprehension and net navigation.

The best way to start creating a webquest is to find a good website, if possible with a topical theme for your students. The Olympics, Iraq, recycling, tourist attractions in Tokyo. You name it there is a great site for it somewhere on the internet. The key to a good webquest is that you, the teacher, navigate the website first and create a number of tasks for the students to complete. These tasks should be incorporated into a worksheet that can be examined together as a class before letting the students loose on the internet. This way they will know what they have to do before they start. This is vital in the internet classroom, as we said earlier internet navigation is an art, and students need help and guidance in this skill if they are going to complete the task well.

Unless you have computers with fast internet connections avoid sites with lots of Flash animation as they will take a long time to load. It is this kind of knowledge you gain from researching your class well before using it in the computer classroom. There’s nothing worse that designing a great worksheet and watching the class grind to a disastrous halt as pages won’t load and students get distracted.

Internet Scavenger Hunt
While webquests tend to focus on navigating one site a scavenger hunt is internet scan reading practicing how to use search engines (make sure the students use the English version of a search engine!). For this activity you need to think of obscure data and information you want the students to collect like the telephone number for Sydney Opera House or Tom Cruise’s birthday. You could also ask the students to find pictures of famous people or a flag for a certain country. A good scavenger hunt will have 10 to 15 things for students to find. Once again, you should find all the answers before using the worksheet in class. It’s also a good idea to do a few examples together first demonstrating how you want the students to search for the necessary information.

It may seem at first sight that this doesn’t test the student’s English knowledge but remember, the students have to navigate through a website to the correct information. They also have to think what information to put into a search engine and then filter the results – all requiring comprehension skills.

The great power of DVD is that an unwatchable 2-hour movie becomes a great 5 minute scene that can be analysed and used in the classroom.

Forget all that fiddly rewind/forwarding to get to the right place. What’s more DVD usually has a perfect freeze frame giving the opportunity for all sorts of language activities much the same as you could do with a picture.

Music is generally a popular choice with students particularly if you (or they) choose a song they like. What’s important when using music in the classroom is to think of what you as the teacher want to achieve by using music.

Music can serve all sorts of purposes in the classroom from simply relaxing students to practising a particular language point to generating a discussion or for guiding a piece of writing. All of these are valid and useful teaching techniques but it’s essential to carefully plan what you’re going to do in advance.

If you’re going to do an activity using the lyrics from the song, look at the lyrics carefully first. Is there a lexical group apparent in the lyrics, a grammar point or an underlying theme that can be examined in class?

It may seem that it takes a lot more work to provide a modern multimedia class than it would to simply teach the next grammar point in the book. This is true up to a point, but then a good class can always be used more than once and by sharing classes on the internet we can all use each other’s classes. This is the power of the digital age.

Your class today can be online for everyone tomorrow. A teacher in Japan can access the same websites as a teacher in Mexico, just like a teacher in Italy can hire the same DVD as another teacher in Indonesia. Therefore, if you produce a webquest it can be published online for any teacher with an internet connection to use. If you design a DVD class to go with Spiderman 2, teachers all around the world can download and use that class just by hiring the film from a video shop.