How is technology driving education?
Technology is everywhere in education: As a result, using technology for educational purposes include schools using a mix of digital resources, touting potential benefits such as greater ability to personalize, higher engagement among students, enhanced ability to keep content updated and current, and greater interactivity and adaptivity (or responsiveness to individual learners) Generally, the hope is that putting devices in the hands of students will help with some or all of the following goals:
- Allowing teachers and software to deliver more personalized content and lessons to students, while allowing students to learn at their own pace and ability level;
- Helping students to become technologically skilled and literate and thus better prepared for modern workplaces;
- Empowering students to do more complex and creative work by allowing them to use digital and online applications and tools;
- Improving the administration and management of schools and classrooms by making it easier to gather information on what students know and have done;
- Improving communications among students, teachers, and parents.
Learning management systems, student information systems, and other software are also used to distribute assignments, manage schedules and communications, and track student progress. Educational software and applications have grown more “adaptive,” relying on technology and algorithms to determine not only what a student knows, but what his or her learning process is, and even his or her emotional state (Herold, 2016).
In conclusion, technology is a powerful tool that can support and transform education in many ways, from making it easier for teachers to create instructional materials to enabling new ways for people to learn and work together. With the worldwide reach of the Internet and the ubiquity of smart devices that can connect to it, a new age of anytime anywhere education is dawning. It will be up to instructional designers and educational technologies to make the most of the opportunities provided by technology to change education so that effective and efficient education is available to everyone everywhere (Perdue University, 2022).
Joy,
ReplyDeleteKudos to you for a very insightful and succinct post. As someone who's been both an instructional designer and educational technologist for most of my career, I think that this post is a good first step to orient (and reorient) aspiring instructional designers and edtechs. It took me back to my first brush with both fields where I spent a lot of time wondering how I should integrate technology in my own classrooms and making sure that learning is both meaningful and relevant to my students, not knowing where to start.
Would you care sharing your own experiences as either an instructional designer or educational technologist? I'm very curious to know if my peers have also experienced the same thing and how they overcame it..
Greg
Greg,
DeleteAs a new educator, I am learning and using different tools to incorporate into lessons to engage students, to get them to want to listen or learn the material. Instructional designing is a term that describes how we, educators, create relevant material but with interesting ways to learn. Educators are responsible for writing learning objectives, developing audio, visual, and interactive media aids, planning and creating assessments, and the final step, creating the layout of the instructional material which are components that help describe the term, instructional designer.
With every chapter or course lesson, I create and embed information that will be relevant yet engaging to my students. I add YouTube videos within power points to drive home lessons such as photoelectric absorption and interactions. It gives the student a second way to grasp the material, to grasp what I lectured, and to now see the lecture portion come to be. It helps make the words become real life.