Not too long ago, PowerPoint was considered cutting edge technology in Higher Education. Today, Web 2.0 tools are making serious in-roads into Higher Education to help create a social and collaborative learning environment. Schools are continually challenged to provide the best education for today's youth. "What worked for us" isn't necessarily good enough for our children because society is continually changing. We call our vision for the future the "learner-active, technology-infused classroom".
Technology provides opportunities never before available and therefore should transform the learning environment for all school community members. Technology tools have come a long way. Schools do not need to spend as much time teaching about computers as they did a decade ago. Instead, teachers and students can now take advantage of all variety of tools and software to offer in the learning process. Technology and the Internet provide access to information around the world; they allow students to explore topics such as space travel and oceanography through sounds, images, and video; they allow students to easily graph and analyze numeric data; they allow students to present and receive information in "real time" from others; and much more. By placing computers right in the classrooms and designing curriculum tasks that allow students to use computers in the course of their learning, students are thoroughly appreciating the value of the technology tools.
In addition to learning the basic skills, students need time to work on open-ended problems to apply those skills. These types of problems are best attacked as a group. A relevant example would be the current project for one of our group where they need to propose a curriculum plan to help Marvin create collaborative mentoring model for his new website (creating the "felt-need" to learn about Filipino education system in question). Working well in a global group does not come easily without the development of a set of skills, such as communicating ideas, sharing responsibility, listening, taking turns, etc. These skills can only be developed, maintained, and refined if they are used consistently and collaboratively.
As for hindering students understanding due to the use of various Web 2.0 tools, I personally cannot find a good instance. In my experience as a teacher, I found that these tools and modern apps helped my students learn faster and gave them a more interactive experience. I think as long as we know how to take advantage of all these useful technology and possess the skill set to manage them efficiently, we should try to infuse them in our education system.
In conclusion, learning technology of today is being shaped with the help of Web 2.0 tools to create a social, highly collaborative and personalized environment. Educators, management and administrators who are proactive in embracing this trend with the help of the right technology partner, are in a position to create significant competitive advantages. This includes not just an enhanced learning paradigm but also efficient economies of scale for the educational organization to meet the growing demand of classrooms.
Your posting makes me think of how the shift from technologies such as PowerPoint to Web 2.0 tools demonstrates a potential shift in power within learning environments. PowerPoint (or web ages), for example, was primarily a one-directional technology designed to transfer information from a presenter to an audience. Now the audience has a voice and the media is a continuous work in progress.
ReplyDeleteI hope as you wrote that direct instruction of technology skills will become less necessary as it becomes more ubiquitous. Students are learning to utilize Web 2.0 tools throughout their daily lives for their own personal / social purposes. However, one issue is that although there will be some transfer, the purposes of the uses of these technologies in classroom does differ, and students will need to understand how academic knowledge is constructed within these media.