“Teach Each Other”
Learning happens in both cases; both student and teacher.
Not unlike the Amish who have the elders to decide how much technology may be used on a daily basis, our educators decide how much technology is incorporated into their teaching method.
“Learning should always come first but would be fools we would be if we denied that technology has the potential to make a tangible difference in education.” – Steve Wheeler
The power of technology has grown rapidly in the past decade and it is our duty to exploit In terms of education to prepare the students better for the pre discursive learnings that are needed for the future.
I remember whilst at school; as a student, you would feel such pride when you were allowed book “Computer Time”. Having to wait 3 – 5 minutes; drumming your fingers on the keyboard to the dial tone of the loading internet browser, escaping the mundane chalk board was euphoric. We never knew what to research and as children with access to a vast archive of knowledge we were left to play badly animated .swf files for 10 minutes. For lack of a better reason we didn’t understand the power we controlled.
What happens when the student knows more than the teacher?
My sibling have recently entered the joy that is second level education; and now, adapting to a new environment, multiple teachers he tries to manipulate and puberty, what my brother has trouble. Trouble coping with was the lack technology used in the institute.
The younger generation are born into technology and to restrict the access of it to students in probably the most important setting they will need it is ludicrous. To emphasise suggesting; imagine if the student goes to the library, they would use the computer to search and not a physical file system. T emphasize this point – You- tube has over 3 billion searches a day.
Learning in the future some teachers may not understand that student are given access to a separate library to search for knowledge i.e. the internet two most used is Google and You-tube. How would teachers open the minds and offer a broader range to the students to help them to go the extra mile in their education if the student knows more than the teacher. Teenagers will now ask a machine rather than an index for their required information.
How can teachers ensure that learning always comes first and that technology will supports the process?
Students in today’s society are not taught how to use the computer, what is its true purpose. Nobody actively telling them to research Ralf Waldo Emerson or Alan Watts or how having technology in the classroom would be one of the greatest tools to expand their mind-set and connect to a broad world. What if students don’t understand that technology has become a window to allow them to partake in events around the globe in every sense but physical.
Many educators have incorporated Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. It is a leading trend in distance education/open and distance learning domain as a consequence of the openness movement.
Given the diversity of users, creators and sponsors of open educational resources, it is not surprising to find a variety of use cases and requirements. For this reason, it may be as helpful to consider the differences between descriptions of open educational resources as it is to consider the descriptions themselves. One of several tensions in reaching a consensus description of OER is whether there should be explicit emphasis placed on specific technologies. For example, a video can be openly licensed and freely used without being a streaming video. A book can be openly licensed and freely used without being an electronic document. This technologically driven tension is deeply bound up with the discourse of open-source licensing
. An educator willing to incorporate OER to help their curriculum, shows that they are striving to give the student more than the text-book standard education. Not all educators willing to use OER might be particular “Tech-Savvy” and as such feel it a daunting task for themselves to learn.
Many teachers at this very moment are left to deal with a system that would consider “Over the shoulder learning” (i.e. two to three student using a particular device together because of lack of equipment) manageable.Consider 27 students in a computer lab that consists of 25 computers. 4 students would have to share. Out of 27 student 4 would have their learning experience cut to facilitate their classmates. 4 out of 27 are now behind. How do we combat this? Ask yourself, how would you combat this?
By appreciating that learning often occurs during creative moments. And when that creativity happens collaboratively, powerful synergies come into play. Creative people do not have answers, but they habitually question the status quo and think about alternatives and improvements. They discover and invent possible answers. They habitually ask better questions. They have optimism. When combined with empathy and compassion, creativity is bound to be a force for good.
The call for presenters for this year’s ICT in Education conference is now open at bit.ly/icteducall.
To keep updated with current information pertaining to the ICT in Education conference please visit https://twitter.com/ICTedu
The ICTEDU (ICT in Education ) shall take place Saturday the 23rd of April in Limerick Institute of Technology, Thurles. For more information see http://lit.ie/ictedu.
Written by Stuart Mackey, Creative Multimedia student in Limerick Institute of Technology, Clonmel, helping to promote #ICTEDU during syndicated online conversations, along with his team Linda Maxwell and Liam Rielly.
