I travel from company to company teaching English to small groups of Japanese adults. In every lesson, I use a video projector to put the image of my laptop's screen on a whiteboard. I use Microsoft Word as my "chalkboard," and the video projector enlarges the monitor's image to cover the entire whiteboard. With a group of only four or five students, and when no video projector is available, a TV or desktop monitor serves as my second choice. At the beginning of each lesson, I open a new document that has a monthly calendar showing attendance, which is cut and pasted into the next lesson's document. The lesson plan is just below it.

Using this method, I can type anything on the whiteboard in a fraction of the time it would take me to write by hand, and with perfect legibility. The "blackboard" itself tells me when I make a spelling mistake, and corrects it for me with the click of a button. I can switch to an IPA or Japanese font when it serves me. I can change the color of words instantly when comparing parts of speech. I can change the color of the whiteboard itself (the document's background color) to compensate for lighting conditions. I can highlight words and phrases, and move or copy them to other areas of the board, never touching an eraser and leaving the surface of the board spotless. Blank tables of various configurations are produced with a couple of keystrokes via macros.

I make heavy use of PowerPoint for the presentation of new materials, since I don't have to fumble around with cards, flipcharts, or other such materials. At any time during any lesson, we can review old materials since they're all at my fingertips. I can do a keyword search of my library of 80,000 images and video clips in a matter of seconds, which proves particularly useful when translation doesn't serve. I can find an entry in a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia faster than anyone can look it up manually, and everyone in the room can see it clearly.

By cutting and pasting into flash card software, I can make flash cards on the spot without interrupting the conversation. We review any new words/phrases at the end of each lesson using translation, fill-in-the-blank, and multiple choice formats, and with any combination of multimedia content. I can categorize the flash cards according to date, topic, part of speech, individual student, etc. We usually review the words at the beginning of subsequent lessons, and I mark each one as "learned" or "still needs practice".

I occasionally use DVD video for listening exercises, and can choose from any combination of English and Japanese audio tracks and subtitles, or none of the above. Given the digital nature of DVD, I don't waste time as I would with a tape when searching for any particular scene. I just go right to it by entering the time code. A single spoken word or phrase can be repeated in an automatic loop as often as necessary. I can even search the text of the subtitles if I have the movie script in a separate document. And it's easy enough to carry around 20 movies in a CD wallet just five inches square and two inches thick. Songs as well can be presented with lyrics much like karaoke, and can be stored on the hard disk in quantity using the mp3 format. Although I haven't done so yet, it would be easy enough to create a digital metronome for jazz chants and the like.

I never erase the whiteboard. I just scroll down the page to clear the whiteboard for new content. If I want to reference the material later, I just scroll back up. If the material is from a different lesson, I just open the appropriate day's document, and we can see the context in which the material was previously used. By adding each day's text to a separate, comprehensive master document for the course, I can search that document for a single word or phrase used previously anytime during the year. If I know the content in question was tackled with a completely different group of students in another course, I have access to that course's master document as well. This makes it easier to find recurring problems and remedy them. Another alternative is to use software that searches for a word or phrase within multiple documents simultaneously, and then returns a list of occurrences wrapped by the thirty words that surround them, thus reminding us of the context in which the searched items were previously used. Some students give me a floppy disk at the end of each lesson on which to copy all the day's materials. One of my students even makes a bitmap from each lesson's Word document and uses it as his PC's desktop background image until the next lesson! This way he it's easy for him study any time he has a free minute.

Of course, if the students or I want to write on the whiteboard with markers, that's no problem. I can even unobtrusively highlight any portion of a student's writing, in progress, from my chair, simply by dragging my cursor over the appropriate area of the screen. Writing assignments can be sent to me via email, corrected anonymously in class on the whiteboard, and sent back to the writer after class. In this way, the students assist in correcting their own and each other's work. At the end of each lesson, I have a complete record of virtually everything we did that day. This makes it very easy to get a high degree of continuity from one lesson to the next, or to print out written reports of each lesson for my supervisors. Although I don't do it, it wouldn't be difficult at all to have the computer record an audio file of the lesson and then post it on a class web site.

This is, of course, by no means a high tech use of computers. I don't write a single line of code to make these CALL materials. They're simply a collection of common software for accessing accumulated materials in a massive but at the same time extremely compact and portable file cabinet. With a refined and personalized methodology to suit my needs, I replace the traditional teaching tools to give me greater productivity on the fly. After using this method for two years, I wouldn't trade the laptop/projector/whiteboard combination for the traditional tools ever, if given a choice. I guess I would say it's like using interactive, multimedia transparencies that keep their own records of everything I do in a class, all of them fitting in one neat little box, and keeping the chalk off my pants.