Something more than search engine for classroom

My calssmet who has the new Iphone 4 S showed me an aminzing feature of it. Later, I also saw the feature on TV ad. The phone has a feature called siri. I can say that it literally can talk to you. It provides information about what you ask. We tried to inquire about a lot of things such as the capital city of my country, the current prime minister and other questions. See the following dialogue between myself and the phone. 

Me: I love you

I Phine 4 S: But I respect you

Me: Why don’t you love me back?

I Phone 4 S: I am not allowed to

Is that not exciting??!!!!!!!!! It of course reminded me the film called I Robot, Will Smith.

I am thinking about how can we use such resources in supplementing our practice of teaching and learning.

 I am convinsed that things that we read on science fiction novels and watch on movies will come to be reality. How fantastic is technology. It is really making life easy.

In my ICT in ELT class I came across a website aclled Wolframe Alpha. I have see that it is a much more practical help for my question above, helping teaching and learning.

Let me discuss briefly what Wolframe Alpha is and comment on how can we use it in supplementing teaching and learning in general and Engliah language teaching and learning in particular.

Wolframe Alpha is like a search webiste that provide you quick information. You can inquire the result of simple arthemetics or factual information or more complecated economic and chemical information. The website provides you reasonably reliable answer. Just type your inquiry and press enter button. It even goes to th extent of giving you possible answers if your questions are mis typed.

What does it has for teachers of Englaih Language?

The two things that come to my mind are Task Based Language Learning and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). I know that both are engaging for the learners. In the case of the later, we can teach students about a subject matter and use the opportunity to help them development their language skills in that aspect. Hence, Wolfram Alpha can be a source of relevant information for the activities for our students. In the case of the former, We can provide students tasks such as finding facts and figures and reporting. As mentioned earlier, Wolframe Aplha can also be a reliable source of information for students. The other aspect of important input from Wolfram Alpha is that it can provide cooked information that facilitate communication and effective use of the target language.

What can we do to make the best use of it?

Wolframe Alpha  has some special characteristis compaired to other search engines. It provides readily available and well cooked information that the user can work on. Therefore, if the student knows exactly what to inquire, she can get the infromation. The level of the learner often determines the type of information that she inquires. This enables saving time of the learner. Teachers can facilitate the use of the wesite to get infromation. However,  they need to be very confident about how far students can use them to help their own learning.