Educaplay: Necessity is the mother of invention.

You may be wondering why I have drawn such a connection between this tool and this proverb. In fact, there needs to be an adjustment of the latter to serve its communicative purpose.
These months since my last post were full of enriching experiences. I've lived unforgettable moments with new people in an attempt to share my passion towards learning a foreign language. Technology has been an essential and irreplaceable tool in this process of building my own teaching practices. It has helped find materials to make lessons interesting; it has inspired games or entertaing actitivites and it has kept me in contact with students in various ways. Therefore, during this year I've realised how important it is to be constantly innovating and bringing new ideas to lessons.
As the title of the entry reads: 'Necessity is the mother of invention'. To my mind, this proverb gives the message that ingenious solutions to challenges come up when you really need them. In other words, when you have set a particular objective that you want to accomplish and this aim becomes a necessity for you, you will do your best to find a way out.
One of my teaching aims has been to transmit the feeling that learning a language is an enjoyable experience. Though, at times, I've felt that I lacked ideas or resources to achieve my aim.

When Farah, Agustín, Brian and I designed our Pecha Kucha, we included Educaplay in our list of the tools we wished to talk about. The 20 seconds we devoted to it appreciated the benefits of using it so that entertainment and learning go hand in hand. At the time, we had little time and I didn't have the chance to create my own account and desing an activity of my own.
As Prensky states in his article 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrats', an immigrant can be recognised when they call a friend to check the reception of an email, when they print a document to edit it or when they read the manual for a program before using it. Regarding Educaplay, I did my effort not to have the reaction of an immigrant: I decided to give it a try without reading anything about it beforehand.
I succeeded in creating my account, browsing the galleries for learning resources and creating my own activity. I still need to go on exploring the uses and benefits of the site. In my opinion, it has undergone the quality controls so far.