Can Technology Improve the Quality of Education?


All over the world, educators are now increasingly turning towards technology or at least incorporating digital elements in the classroom to reduce the cost of academics. Below are the three main reasons why educators are moving towards a digital academic environment.

Enhance Fact to Face Interaction: a lot of teachers are now starting to believe that the use of technology inside the class does not render the services of an educator obsolete. Instead, having a digital classroom environment can enrich the process of learning by keep the students engaged during the class and help the teacher provide integrative feedback to the class. An example of such a classroom can be an English composition class where students are required to do a lot of writing. Any students who want to get feedback on their piece of assignment writing can volunteer and the teacher can place the paper on the screen so that the entire can see it. A teacher can make comments on what a student can do to improve his assignment and the students can also give peer reviews to the student whose paper is on the screen.

Adaptive Learning: statistics have indicated that over 70% of students in the United States come from varying backgrounds and speak a second language besides English. Many students who have the chance to enroll in high education standard universities have high GPAs in high school; however even then their prowess in the English language and their ability to write complex, sophisticated English is very low. For such a diverse class, many teachers have opted to use an interactive, adaptive tool by McGraw and Hill called LearnSmart Achieve; this tool analyzes the student’s capabilities by determining what type of skills a student possesses and then creates an assignment designed specifically for him. Because the custom research paper is tailor made to them, a student can understand on which subjects he should give more of his efforts.

Active Engagement: Students avoid buying new books because they have become so expensive in prints. Many students either try to share their books with their roommates or buy them second hand which often result in having a wrong edition. Because of this teachers are now starting to rely on digital platforms because students can buy books in online format at reasonable prices; plus they will need to purchase access because they will have to view their graded assignments from there. Another reason is that the digital multi-media is very interactive and instead of relying on students to read a chapter of their books, teacher can assign them the material and they interact with it. This means they will read the material or watch a video or listen to a tutorial and give their responses by clicking on buttons or entering answers in relevant boxes.

Many educators believe that using digital modes for a classroom will cut into their already busy schedules; however in the long run once all the interactive tools have been implemented, teachers will see that it reduces their time as well as their efforts by a big margin.




Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    January 2014

    Categories

    All