Stephan Hughes is a teacher trainer/developer at Cultura Inglesa, an English language lecturer for Translation and ELT grad programs, a social learner, a co-founder of#nt2t chat, and a blogger.  He is originally from Trinidad and Tobago, but works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  You can find him on Twitter at @defstef98 and at @stephwurking.  

Originally posted on April 2, 2015 at http://nuthingor2.blogspot.com.br/2015/04/teaching-tech-without-tech.html.

This idea came about thanks to one of the students who shared something that happened with his primary school kids. In one of his lessons, he told students they were going to create word clouds based on the lesson using tools like Wordle, Word it Out, or Tagxedo. His students decided no to wait and created their own by drawing clouds on pieces of paper and writing in their words. When he shared this with us, I saw this as an ideal opportunity to put it into practice and to show how sometimes we don’t need to technology to teach about it. The activity was also a superb way of reminding us teachers that we have to see the pedagogical gain in any activity designed with the use of some new technological resource before we think of wanting to use the tool in the first place. So at the end of the lesson, I asked my two students @teixeira_may and @Marcel_Figsil to create a word cloud of our class. I did the same. Behold the results:

Here is the #techchallenge: how would you/do you teach (about) technology without using technology? Think of an activity you would do with a digital tool in the classroom without actually using the tool. Spread the ideas with the hashtag #techchallenge