The technological development of Education
The education system is pretty simple right? From the ages 4–18, children and teenagers are put into the normal routine of waking up, brushing your teeth, eat breakfast and then head off to school for the day where they gain an education on all things that impact life.
However, the ordinary schedule was broken when the COVID 19 pandemic took over the world and people were forced by law in their countries to stay indoors. Who would’ve thought we would be living in a time where it was illegal to be going into school? In this article, we see how education adapted to the pandemic but also the technologies that have benefitted education.
This was the data of school closures across the globe on April 20 2021, we can see the majority of countries had closures with the official figure being 1,291,004,434 of learners in 151 countries being affected. This data provided by UNESCO allowed us to see the impact on how COVID 19 was spread throughout the world on the education sector. Without this technology of global monitoring, it would’ve been near enough impossible to compare countries and see how they are each treating education throughout the pandemic. It was important as it showed a togetherness for students which could’ve reduced anxiety and the stress of feeling alone.
The year 2020 was the time of being an owner of a pharmaceutical company or a webcam communication service, which Eric Yuan was. His company Zoom skyrocketed as communicating online became the norm. The firm’s sales in the last three months of 2020 were up 370% compared to the same period in 2019, hitting $882.5m. Zoom was an imperative tool used greatly by schools and colleges to allow teaching to still go ahead as normal as possible. Had the pandemic strike 15 years ago, technology was not advanced enough to have create a solution for lockdown teaching.
There are now more resources than ever to help students gain a further understanding of a topic. Khan Academy is an online revision resource that aimed to help students develop their skills further. As a non-profiting organisation, one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk donated $5,000,000 to the Khan Academy in recognition to how the digital educational service is impacting young students. In their annual report in 2018, 70 million people used the service to prepare for their exams. The youtube channel also has 7.11 million subscribers showing its one of the highest educational channels out there.
TikTok can also now be viewed as an educational source as there are many channels out there that promote learning for Generation Z. It’s no surprise that social media is one of the biggest distractions when trying to study, therefore why not have channels that can be learnt from whilst scrolling. TikTok is an application that allows for short and simple videos, therefore concentration levels are high. An example of a popular channel is ‘mathswithmisschang’ who has 350,000 followers on the social media. Could this be a new way that future generations interact with studying?
Parents play a pivotal role in a childs learning experience, it’s known that parental involvement leads to stronger and engaged relationships with your school. With both parents and the school engaged, there’s more understanding between teachers, parents and children. However, parents sometimes have busy work schedules that don’t allow them to go into school constantly and meet with teachers. This is why communication technologies such as email or video chatting come to be important. It allows for flexibility to be able to keep up with a childs progress for parents.
Working as a group and being a team player is one of the most valuable traits an individual can possess. This is an important reason why project based work in teams is encouraged throughout the educational experience. Microsoft saw an opportunity in this and developed tools such as word, powerpoint and excel that allows individuals to collaborate on the same document to work on a group project. Some benefits of this include project management tools to handle time management, video conferencing to build relationships and the fact that instant messaging is present allows for quick communication whilst everyone is collaborating on a document.
Students with disabilities must be given the opportunity to succeed as much as other students. Therefore, assistive technologies have been designed and developed to cater for those with learning difficulties such as dyslexia. An example of assistive technologies include text-to-speech, where it’s possible to hear the audio of text instead of reading. This is particularly useful for those who have difficulties reading long pieces of text. Despite there being more assistive technologies than ever, there is still a shortage of special-ed teachers who are qualified, this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Lastly and probably the most significant technology that took education to the next level and takes the above technologies all in one, the internet. From its invention by Tim Bernes-Lee in 1989, the world wide web has continuously grown into a powerful tool that changed the dynamic of gaining information. As a society, it has allowed us to connect to other peoples opinions, viewpoints and research that could only be accessed physically before. Society now has the opportunity to learn more than ever before with this technology, it shouldn’t be taken for granted as previous generations didn’t have the luxury to understand depths of information about different topics.
In conclusion, the world has benefitted undoubtedly with technology with the education sector being one of the most impacted. The way humans are able to use extensive learning technologies to develop their learning is a privilege. Even during the toughest of times as a modern society with the pandemic, technology and digital media allowed us to still be in contact with teachers and class mates to ensure the learning was disrupted as little as possible.
Let’s look forward to further groundbreaking educational technologies that will shape our society further…
