In the past few years of research on instructional technology has resulted in a clearer vision of how technology can impact teaching and learning. Today, virtually every school in the United States of America uses technology as an integral part of teaching and learning and with each state featuring its own customized technology program. In most of these schools, teachers utilize the technology through integrated activities that are an integral part of their daily school curriculum. For example, instructional technology creates an active environment where students not merely inquire, but in addition define problems of interest to them. Such an activity would integrate the subjects of technology, social studies, math, science, and language arts with the ability to produce student-centered activity. Most educational technology experts agree, however, that technology should be integrated, never as another subject or as a once-in-a-while project, but as an instrument to promote and extend student learning on a regular basis.
Today, classroom teachers may lack personal experience with technology and present yet another challenge. To be able to incorporate technology-based activities and projects to their curriculum, those teachers first must find the time to understand to utilize the tools and understand the terminology required for participation in projects or activities. They need to have the capability to employ technology to enhance student learning along with to help personal professional development.
Instructional technology empowers students by improving skills and concepts through multiple representations and enhanced visualization. Its benefits include increased accuracy and speed in data collection and graphing, real-time visualization, the capability to collect and analyze large volumes of data and collaboration of data collection and interpretation, and more varied presentation of results. Technology also engages students in higher-order thinking, builds strong problem-solving skills, and develops deep comprehension of concepts and procedures when used appropriately.
Technology should play a crucial role in academic content standards and their successful implementation. Expectations reflecting the correct usage of technology should be woven to the standards, benchmarks and grade-level indicators. For instance, the standards will include expectations for students to compute fluently using paper and pencil, technology-supported and mental methods and to utilize graphing calculators or computers to graph and analyze mathematical relationships. Write for Us Technology These expectations should be designed to support a curriculum full of the utilization of technology rather than limit the utilization of technology to specific skills or grade levels. Technology makes subjects accessible to all students, including those with special needs. Options for assisting students to increase their strengths and progress in a standards-based curriculum are expanded through the utilization of technology-based support and interventions. For instance, specialized technologies enhance opportunities for students with physical challenges to produce and demonstrate mathematics concepts and skills. Technology influences how exactly we work, how exactly we play and how exactly we live our lives. The influence technology in the classroom must have on math and science teachers’ efforts to provide every student with “the ability and resources to produce the language skills they should pursue life’s goals and to participate fully as informed, productive members of society,” cannot be overestimated.
Technology provides teachers with the instructional technology tools they should operate more proficiently and to become more attentive to the average person needs of these students. Selecting appropriate technology tools give teachers a way to build students’ conceptual knowledge and connect their understanding how to problem present in the world. The technology tools such as for example Inspiration® technology, Starry Night, A WebQuest and Portaportal allow students to employ many different strategies such as for example inquiry, problem-solving, creative thinking, visual imagery, critical thinking, and hands-on activity.
Benefits of the utilization of these technology tools include increased accuracy and speed in data collection and graphing, real-time visualization, interactive modeling of invisible science processes and structures, the capability to collect and analyze large volumes of data, collaboration for data collection and interpretation, and more varied presentations of results.
Technology integration strategies for content instructions. Beginning in kindergarten and extending through grade 12, various technologies can be made an integral part of everyday teaching and learning, where, as an example, the utilization of meter sticks, hand lenses, temperature probes and computers becomes an easy element of what teachers and students are learning and doing. Contents teachers should use technology in ways that enable students to conduct inquiries and engage in collaborative activities. In traditional or teacher-centered approaches, computer technology can be used more for drill, practice and mastery of basic skills.
The instructional strategies employed such classrooms are teacher centered because of the way they supplement teacher-controlled activities and because the application used to provide the drill and practice is teacher selected and teacher assigned. The relevancy of technology in the lives of young learners and the capacity of technology to improve teachers’ efficiency are helping to boost students’ achievement in new and exciting ways.
As students undertake grade levels, they are able to engage in increasingly sophisticated hands-on, inquiry-based, personally relevant activities where they investigate, research, measure, compile and analyze information to attain conclusions, solve problems, make predictions and/or seek alternatives. They can explain how science often advances with the introduction of new technologies and how solving technological problems often results in new scientific knowledge. They need to describe how new technologies often extend the present quantities of scientific understanding and introduce new aspects of research. They need to explain why basic concepts and principles of science and technology should be an integral part of active debate in regards to the economics, policies, politics and ethics of various science-related and technology-related challenges.
Students need grade-level appropriate classroom experiences, enabling them to understand and to be able to do science in an active, inquiry-based fashion where technological tools, resources, methods and processes are plentiful and extensively used. As students integrate technology into learning about and doing science, emphasis should be placed on how best to think through problems and projects, not only things to think.
Technological tools and resources may range between hand lenses and pendulums, to electronic balances and up-to-date online computers (with software), to methods and processes for planning and performing a project. Students can learn by observing, designing, communicating, calculating, researching, building, testing, assessing risks and benefits, and modifying structures, devices and processes – while applying their developing knowledge of science and technology.
Most students in the schools, at all age levels, might possess some expertise in the utilization of technology, however K-12 they should observe that science and technology are interconnected and that using technology involves assessment of the advantages, risks and costs. Students should build scientific and technological knowledge, along with the skill required to create and construct devices. In addition, they should develop the processes to fix problems and realize that problems might be solved in many ways.
Rapid developments in the design and uses of technology, particularly in electronic tools, will change how students learn. For instance, graphing calculators and computer-based tools provide powerful mechanisms for communicating, applying, and learning mathematics in the workplace, in everyday tasks, and in school mathematics. Technology, such as for example calculators and computers, help students learn mathematics and support effective mathematics teaching. Rather than replacing the educational of basic concepts and skills, technology can connect skills and procedures to deeper mathematical understanding. For instance, geometry software allows experimentation with families of geometric objects, and graphing utilities facilitate learning about the characteristics of classes of functions.
Learning and applying mathematics requires students to become adept in using many different techniques and tools for computing, measuring, analyzing data and solving problems. Computers, calculators, physical models, and measuring items are samples of the wide variety of technologies, or tools, used to show, learn, and do mathematics. These tools complement, rather than replace, more traditional ways of accomplishing mathematics, such as for example using symbols and hand-drawn diagrams.
Technology, used appropriately, helps students learn mathematics. Electronic tools, such as for example spreadsheets and dynamic geometry software, extend the range of problems and develop comprehension of key mathematical relationships. A strong foundation in number and operation concepts and skills must use calculators effectively as an instrument for solving problems involving computations. Appropriate uses of these and other technologies in the mathematics classroom enhance learning, support effective instruction, and impact the quantities of emphasis and ways certain mathematics concepts and skills are learned. For example, graphing calculators allow students to quickly and easily produce multiple graphs for a set of data, determine appropriate ways to show and interpret the info, and test conjectures in regards to the impact of changes in the data.