In the past few years of explore on instructional technology has resulted in a clearer foresight of how technology can influence teaching and learning. Today, practically every school in the United States of America uses technology as a part of teaching and studying and with each state having its own customized technology program. In most of those schools, teachers use the technology through integrated activities that are a part of their daily school curriculum. For instance, instructional technology creates an active environment in which students not only inquire, but also define problems of interest to them. Such an activity would combine the subjects of technology, social studies, math, science, and language arts with the opportunity to create student-centered activity. Most educational technology experts agree, however, that technology should be integrated, not as a separate branch or as a once-in-a-while project, but as a tool to promote and expand learner studying on a daily basis.
Today, classroom teachers may lack personal taste with technology and present an added challenge. In order to combine technology-based activities and projects into their curriculum, those teachers first must find the time to learn to use the tools and understand the terminology considerable for participation in projects or activities. They must have the ability to hire technology to improve learner studying as well as to added personal pro development.
Data Collection Tools
Instructional technology empowers students by enhancing skills and concepts through multiple representations and enhanced visualization. Its benefits comprise increased accuracy and speed in data collection and graphing, real-time visualization, the ability to get 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 considerable role in academic content standards and their prosperous implementation. Expectations reflecting the proper use of technology should be woven into the standards, benchmarks and grade-level indicators. For example, the standards should comprise expectations for students to compute fluently using paper and pencil, technology-supported and thinking methods and to use graphing calculators or computers to graph and analyze mathematical relationships. These expectations should be intended to preserve a curriculum rich in the use of technology rather than limit the use of technology to exact skills or grade levels. Technology makes subjects accessible to all students, together with those with special needs. Options for assisting students to maximize their strengths and strengthen in a standards-based curriculum are expanded through the use of technology-based preserve and interventions. For example, specialized technologies improve opportunities for students with bodily challenges to invent and demonstrate mathematics concepts and skills. Technology influences how we work, how we play and how we live our lives. The influence technology in the classroom should have on math and science teachers' efforts to provide every learner with "the opportunity and resources to invent the language skills they need to pursue life's goals and to partake fully as informed, efficient members of society," cannot be overestimated.
Technology provides teachers with the instructional technology tools they need to operate more efficiently and to be more responsive to the individual needs of their students. Choosing proper technology tools give teachers an opportunity to build students' conceptual knowledge and associate their studying to problem found in the world. The technology tools such as Inspiration® technology, Starry Night, A WebQuest and Portaportal allow students to hire a collection of strategies such as inquiry, problem-solving, creative thinking, visual imagery, considerable thinking, and hands-on activity.
Benefits of the use of these technology tools comprise increased accuracy and speed in data collection and graphing, real-time visualization, interactive modeling of invisible science processes and structures, the ability to get 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, varied technologies can be made a part of daily teaching and learning, where, for example, the use of meter sticks, hand lenses, climatic characteristic probes and computers becomes a seamless part of what teachers and students are studying and doing. Contents teachers should use technology in ways that enable students to show the way inquiries and engage in collaborative activities. In traditional or teacher-centered approaches, computer technology is used more for drill, custom and mastery of basic skills.
The instructional strategies employed in such classrooms are teacher centered because of the way they supplement teacher-controlled activities and because the software used to provide the drill and custom is teacher prime 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 raise students' achievement in new and bright ways.
As students move through grade levels, they can engage in increasingly sophisticated hands-on, inquiry-based, personally relevant activities where they investigate, research, measure, compile and analyze information to reach conclusions, solve problems, make predictions and/or seek alternatives. They can explicate how science often advances with the introduction of new technologies and how solving technological problems often results in new scientific knowledge. They should reveal how new technologies often expand the current levels of scientific comprehension and introduce new areas of research. They should explicate why basic concepts and ideas of science and technology should be a part of active debate about the economics, policies, politics and ethics of varied science-related and technology-related challenges.
Students need grade-level proper classroom experiences, enabling them to learn and to be able to do science in an active, inquiry-based fashion where technological tools, resources, methods and processes are readily available and extensively used. As students combine technology into studying about and doing science, emphasis should be settled on how to think through problems and projects, not just what to think.
Technological tools and resources may range from hand lenses and pendulums, to electronic balances and modern online computers (with software), to methods and processes for planning and doing 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 have some expertise in the use of technology, however K-12 they should recognize that science and technology are interconnected and that using technology involves appraisal of the benefits, risks and costs. Students should build scientific and technological knowledge, as well as the skill required to invent and invent devices. In addition, they should invent the processes to solve problems and understand that problems may be solved in some ways.
Rapid developments in the invent and uses of technology, particularly in electronic tools, will change how students learn. For example, graphing calculators and computer-based tools provide considerable mechanisms for communicating, applying, and studying mathematics in the workplace, in daily tasks, and in school mathematics. Technology, such as calculators and computers, help students learn mathematics and preserve efficient mathematics teaching. Rather than replacing the studying of basic concepts and skills, technology can associate skills and procedures to deeper mathematical understanding. For example, geometry software allows experimentation with families of geometric objects, and graphing utilities facilitate studying about the characteristics of classes of functions.
Learning and applying mathematics requires students to come to be adept in using a collection of techniques and tools for computing, measuring, analyzing data and solving problems. Computers, calculators, bodily models, and measuring devices are examples of the wide collection of technologies, or tools, used to teach, learn, and do mathematics. These tools complement, rather than replace, more traditional ways of doing mathematics, such as using symbols and hand-drawn diagrams.
Technology, used appropriately, helps students learn mathematics. Electronic tools, such as spreadsheets and dynamic geometry software, expand the range of problems and invent comprehension of key mathematical relationships. A strong foundation in number and operation concepts and skills is required to use calculators effectively as a tool for solving problems bright computations. proper uses of those and other technologies in the mathematics classroom improve learning, preserve efficient instruction, and impact the levels of emphasis and ways determined mathematics concepts and skills are learned. For instance, graphing calculators allow students to fast and nothing else but produce multiple graphs for a set of data, decide proper ways to display and explicate the data, and test conjectures about the impact of changes in the data.
Technology is a tool for studying and doing mathematics rather than an end in itself. As with any instructional tool or aid, it is only efficient when used well. Teachers must make considerable decisions about when and how to use technology to focus instruction on studying mathematics.
How Can Instructional Technology Make Teaching and learning More productive in the Schools?
