Week+2

**BENEFITS, OBSTACLES AND THE FUTURE OF E-LEARNING IN VENEZUELA**
 * (This is my contribution to the moodle forum related to this week) **

First of all, I consider Internet as a powerful tool to be used by teacher of the 21st century, but when it is used correctly only. So, a language teacher should, not only know all the resources available for the teaching process, but manage them appropiately, so he can achieve the goal already established in the language classroom. On the web we can find a lot of resources that we can use in our language class. For example if we are teachers of English as a foreign language, we have 2.0 web tools that can help us when developing our students' communicative competence. That is to say, we can use voice resources, videos, wikis, chat room, blogs, podcasts, and let them get in touch with technology and learn how to use it appropriatelty at the same time. On the other hand, e-learning places students in a different role in which they do not have the teacher in front of them all the time correcting their mistakes, so students should have a 100% active, self, and critic role in their learning process. It's possitive since students get a high motivation if the teacher shows them the most updated resources and techniques based on the web tools. Talking about Venezuela, e-learning is being seen as an educational alternative to be used in all the private and public institutions all around the country. In fact, there are some educacion programs in which teachers of all levels are trained to use technology in their classes. However, I think there should exit more attention from the pedagogical point of view, since, many schools and universities have computers and technological resources, but they are used to teach only Informatics, without knowing that they can be used for every subject. As a consequence, students do not take advantage of the information available on the web.

As a conclusion, I would say that technology (specially internet) is considered as a potential tool for teachers and students of the 21st century if it is used in the righ way. So, we as Venezuelan citizens have the huge responsability of training ourselves to face the new era of information and make our country a big source of new and prepared profesionals from all areas.