Technology In Education : The Future of Education

educationStudents flourish when schools use technology to increase teacher performance and improve the quality and quantity of educational content. Effective use of digital learning tools can boost student engagement, help teachers improve their lesson plans and facilitate one-to-one learning.

Technology provides instant access to information, which is why their presence in the classroom is so important : smartphones, computers and tablets already are ubiquitous in the daily lives of students and teachers ; it is only natural that the use of technology devices in the classroom is being explored to create meaningful learning experiences for students of all ages. Integrating technology into education simply means using technology to improve the learning experience of students.

In recent years, a growing interest in educational technology has led to new continuing education programs to prepare teachers to transition to innovative thinking and become leaders in transformative technology in their classrooms, schools or districts.

Quest to Learn – This New York City school uses games and other forms of digital media to provide students with a design and query-driven curriculum. The strategy of combining online learning with schooling is often used to cater to different learning styles of students and empower them to work in ways not possible with regular classroom learning throughout the day. Online learning can increase learning productivity by increasing learning speed, reducing cost of teaching materials and making better use of teacher time.

These strategies can be especially useful in rural areas, where blended or online learning can help teachers and students bridge distances in remote areas. Technology can play an important role in cases where there is a shortage of teachers or low-skilled teachers to partially overcome this gap, when teachers lack content or pedagogical knowledge and can support structured lesson plans or text sentences to develop this potential.

Many people in the field of educational technology see new technology as a powerful tool that can help schools meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. The idea is that digital devices, software, and learning platforms provide a once-unimaginable range of options for customizing learning based on each student’s academic strengths and weaknesses, interests and motivations, personal preferences, and optimal learning rates.

In addition, teachers can now modify lessons based on the performance of individual students or the class as a whole. Technology in education has allowed students to take control of their learning but also given teachers the flexibility to transfer knowledge to students.

In a traditional classroom such as the one we see in de Voltolinas’ illustration, the teacher is the primary source of information and students receive it passively ; this model of the teacher as being stage-wise has been used in education for a long time and is still very evident today, however, in many classrooms we are seeing the role of teachers shifting towards “secondary leadership” as students take more responsibility for their own learning and use technology to gather relevant information.

Schools and universities across the country are beginning to redesign learning spaces to leverage this new educational model, encourage closer interaction and work in small groups, and use technology as a facilitator.

There is no single ed-tech initiative that achieves the same results everywhere because school systems are different for students and teachers and because of availability and quality of materials and technology. Instead, to realize the potential of educational technology to accelerate student learning, decision makers must focus on four possible use cases of technology that leverage its comparative advantage and complement the work of teachers to accelerate student learning (Figure 2). ]

Some critics of educational technology also mentioned a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which found that the countries where 15-year-old children use computers the most in the classroom performed worse on international tests in reading and mathematics.

Some schools do not have the resources to provide all the courses students might need. Advanced internships and foreign language courses can be particularly expensive for the school system when there is little demand for students.