Influence of Technology on Education
What’s the place of tech in the classroom?
The Current Education System
We need to face facts, our schools and institutions today are still using methods of an education system designed for a time where computers didn’t exist. We treat students like cars in a manufacturing plant, every student gets to learn the exact same material, every student is graded the exact same way. Don’t get me wrong, this makes total sense if it was 300 years ago. From speaking to teachers, we’ve identified a few problem areas that need to be tackled:
- Teaching methods used today are mostly outdated, teachers are therefore restricted in their approach / delivery of information.
- Feedback to the teachers is limited and restricting.
- Students prefer learning at their own pace. They enjoy a lot of the class dynamics such as competing with friends occasionally, even then, learning through online methods is gaining more demand.
This post is inspired by a TED video of Sugata Mitra imagining what tomorrow’s education system could look like and experimenting with the power of lettering learners simply explore with the aid of technology.
What’s The Best Use of Technology?
Technology ever since it’s beginnings has been best used to do one thing, and that thing is reducing human effort. You might have needed days to research about a topic using books and libraries not too long ago, and now you can find the answers to your questions within seconds on Google ( or whatever search engine you use ).
That is to say technology is growing at an unimaginable rate, and is an inevitable component of our daily lives, something we are already noticing in our classrooms and almost everywhere else. Applying that to the education space means we need to shift our education system and teaching methods into a tech-friendly approach to reduce human effort and allow space for exploring creative intelligence which is where humans truly excel.
Simply put, trust technology to keep track of things and do all the grunt work, and let students and teachers focus on creative learning.
Technology, And A New Education System
Building a new education system, especially one that empowers creative thinkers, is not exactly what you would call an easy task. But with the right use of technology, a new educational platform becomes a lot less effortful and much more enjoyable.
There are a handful of milestones we need to overcome to achieve the right use of technology in the education space, here are a few of them:
- Understand that the next step for our educational institutions is to become a lot more adaptable towards individual needs.
- Teachers and Instructors identify areas of thinking / learning to serve as measurable data points for a given student’s performance in a given class. For example, a Physics teacher would use integration or word-problems as possible focus areas, whereas a PhysEd teacher would use stamina or accuracy.
- Track students’ growth in any given area and identify trends which can characterize each individual student’s ability and motivate them to keep learning accordingly.
- Empower teachers to get a full prospective of their classes performance through continuous feedback and student growth metrics..
- Get parents involved in the picture. Give parents the ability to see their kids’ interests and progress; the parent can then understand how to help their kids be more engaged life-long learners.
- Provide a reward system which encourages growth in areas such as effort, accountability, persistence, rather than the strict focus on whether or not the student is getting the write answer the first time.
In combination the elements mentioned above along with practice-based learning environments featuring topics from real-life startups and organizations, can create what we can call a suitable learning environment for modern educational institutions.
If you’re a teacher, an entrepreneur, a software developer, or someone who’s passionate about Education and Technology, don’t hesitate to get in touch, we would love to have a chat ☺
