At the final event of the 21st IATEFL Hungary conference participants had the chance to ask the plenary speakers questions. One of the questions Graham Stanley got was: “When was the last time you taught an offline lesson?”

Just in case you didn’t know: Graham Stanley is one of the top experts on using technology in the language classroom.

So the assumption here is that since Graham uses technology in his classroom, he must be using it all the time, probably exclusively. Strangely enough, Jamie Keddie, who gave a talk on storytelling (an excellent one, by the way), didn’t get asked “Do you do anything else in your classroom apart from storytelling?” Sheelagh Deller (another excellent session!) wasn’t asked whether she was always pondering over who influences who in the learning community.

I’ve often had the same question and it always disturbed me: why do you have to assume that just because I happen to believe in using technology I’m so obsessed with it that I do nothing else? Of course Graham explained patiently that most of the time he has offline lessons. But why do we have to justify ourselves? I don’t drink but I still don’t go up to people at conference receptions with a second glass of wine in their hands asking them “How often do you get drunk?” When you give a talk on listening comprehension I don’t ask you whether you’re aware of the fact that speaking skills mustn’t be neglected either.

In his two brilliant sessions, Graham made several very convincing points for using technology in ways that help learners enormously. He showed real life examples from his own teaching which can be used without practically any computer skills, so the sessions were very definitely not exclusively for computer geeks but for a general ELT audience. And then he gets this question… I thought the debate over using technology in teaching was over.

But I don’t want to sound too pessimistic: I’m sure the vast majority of his audience will make excellent use of his ideas and probably even spread the word about them.

To learn more, make sure you check out Graham’s blog, his Twitter feed and his book Digital Play: