As a developer in the education space it seems like the days of institutions being nervous about employing technology in their day to day teaching is over. Teachers and professors are thirsting to find ways to use technology combined with social media to make a difference for their students.
Over the last fifteen years American schools have dramatically increased spending on classroom technology to more than billion annually, because there has been a widely held belief by educational leaders that “wiring schools, buying hardware and software, and distributing the equipment throughout will lead to abundant classroom use by teachers and students and improved teaching and learning.
Many people warn of the possible harmful effects of using technology in the classroom. Will children lose their ability to relate to other human beings? Will they become dependent on technology to learn? Will they find inappropriate materials? The same was probably said with the invention of the printing press, radio, and television. All of these can be used inappropriately, but all of them have given humanity unbounded access to information which can be turned into knowledge. Appropriately used– interactively and with guidance– they have become tools for the development of higher order thinking skills.
Inappropriately used in the classroom, technology can be used to perpetuate old models of teaching and learning. Students can be “plugged into computers” to do drill and practice that is not so different from workbooks. Teachers can use multimedia technology to give more colorful, stimulating lectures. Both of these have their place, but such use does not begin to tap the power of these new tools.
The Web is a complex repository containing a huge maze of information from a variety of sources. It has become a prominent source of information for many people worldwide. The Web has also hit the educational landscape in many big ways. The use of technologies such as the Internet as a teaching tool in schools is not the issue now since it is pervasively used. Rather, the issue is how to effectively employ such technologies and harness fully the new opportunities created by them to promote positive student learning experiences.
In conclusion, the Web has been beneficial in the educational domain as a repository of gargantuan amounts of rich information. However schools, educational policy makers, and instructional/curriculum designers who intend to employ the Internet as a learning tool in their instructional programs must bear in mind and highlight to students the fact that just not any piece of information found on the net can be accepted as being authentic.
Thus it is imperative that students be taught a wide range of internet literacy skills from verifying the veracity of content hosted to seeking for information by using various search strategies and techniques. This will help to ensure that the true potential of the Internet as a learning aid is properly tapped to inject greater vigor into teaching practices in schools.
Tags: classroom technology, educational landscape, educational leaders, employing technology, higher order thinking skills, inappropriate materials, invention of the printing press, last fifteen years, multimedia technology, using technology in the classroom