Is technology effective?
Through a series of unfortunate events, I stumbled across this good question:
Do educational technologies work?
There's a lot of pressure in education to make teaching flashy. Animate every bullet point on your PowerPoint, create a web page that is aesthetically pleasing, and give students every opportunity to tickle the plastic ivories of a computer keyboard and watch pretty things float across the screen.
But are we using technology in a way that it really helps students to learn better? Are they solving problems? thinking critically? grasping a complex idea? and applying their knowledge to new situations?
There's a guy who did a lot of research many, many years ago about the progressive levels of learning from rote knowledge to critical evaluation--Harold Bloom. Maybe you've heard of him? Anyway, it's easy to get stuck at the bottom.
posted by Jessica @ 3:55 PM
4 Comments:
I think it can be a great way for teacers to incorporate interactive technologies such as the smart board, but for the most part it's just a lot of bells and whistles that people are using to keep students interested. The problem is that we're not focusing so much on education as we are on keeping attention.
I go back and forth. I'm terrible at entertaining, but if I can't keep their attention (or better yet, direct it somewhere else), how am I possibly going to teach them anything?
I thnk you probably pay more attention to what you're using than most. I tend to use a lot of TV and movie stuff because it makes what we're talking about relevant to what they see going on in the world around them.
It might help to use technology for educational purposes, especially when it comes to visualizing complex subjects. But I just cannot imagine my then 50+ years old geography teacher using Google earth to show the effect the Gulf Stream has on the climate of Europe.
A good teacher can put technology to good use to make a difference. But it cannot do the job for him. It's the teacher that matters, not the technology.
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