educational essay topics

educational essay topics

The Impact of Educational Technology on Student Learning

1. Introduction to Educational Technology

At their core, computers and other portable technologies offer simple solutions to the most difficult educational challenges. What results are more highly interested learners who have histories of improved academic performances? However, students have been able to choose and access what learning programs are most important for them. In turn, students may believe that greater choice means that digital learning is more engaging and more effective. In addition, they note that increased opportunities to communicate with teachers have been a boon. Only 15% of students in the study said that they preferred having things explained or reviewed in class. Technology has enabled them to get caught up with lessons that they did not understand. U.S. students are now in school nine hours less each year than they were in the 19th century, and some educational researchers insist that children are being academically shortchanged by this reduced instructional time. Forty-eight percent of the students released by Project Tomorrow said “learning can occur anytime, anywhere, and high-quality free content and curriculum is readily available”.

Educational technology is widely identified as one of the central drivers that will alter the educational world. Some researchers argue that the impact of technology, particularly in enhancing student engagement, is incredibly valuable for student learning and achievement. Others, including some US educators and academic researchers associated with the Alliance for Childhood, Educators for Social Responsibility, and the National Association for the Education of Young Children have voiced concerns, and in some cases actively resist developments in educational technology. Proponents of educational technology identify that its successful implementation can address all of the major educational challenges faced by current educational systems, including access, opportunity, effectiveness, and affordability. Schools can break away from the one-size-fits-all instruction allowing diverse learning needs and styles to be accommodated. Huge classroom sizes are no longer an insurmountable obstacle that blocks teachers’ capacity to provide customized, student-centric instruction.

2. Benefits of Educational Technology in Student Learning

Educational technology not only allows students to acquire and explore content relevant to their individual learning styles and needs, but also enables them to use their new learning in new and unique ways, sustaining student motivation and providing challenge and novelty from which important problem solving and growth can occur. Also, educational technologies can enhance the learning of skills that are demonstrated through individual differences. For instance, educational technologies can greatly help students with special needs and those who are academically at risk by enabling them to access and communicate content in alternative ways. By providing these opportunities, educators can use educational technologies to support a broader range of student offerings.

Educational technologies provide students with tools to carry out natural inquiry, the individualized sharing of student thinking and life experiences, collaborative problem solving, and genuine curriculum-based decision making. Students naturally work in cooperative groups, helping one another build meaningful understandings of the world from concrete experiences, dialogue, and discourse. Educational technologies can readily connect students to the worldwide knowledge and information base, facilitating their research and assisting in their literacy development.

3. Challenges and Limitations of Educational Technology

Technology devices can be expensive, not only to purchase but also to maintain, upgrade, often break, and require technical support for repair. Technology demands are difficult to meet. Another aspect of the general difficulty of technology demands is the reality of physical classroom space. Given standard classroom and laboratory configurations, it may not be possible to use technology extensively in classroom completion (though via homework or distance learning, technology could be utilized to a greater extent). Finally, since most people are not adept at using new technology, the curriculum must be designed to go slowly at a pace where students can expect to succeed. Teachers can spend significant time dealing with malfunctioning equipment. It is only recently that the creation and implementation of various educational technology systems can become useful and practical.

Educational technology and the underlying infrastructure are expensive to buy, maintain, or upgrade. There are not only initial infrastructure costs, but costs involved in maintaining and upgrading the technology, which is changing rapidly. Software must be updated, hardware must be replaced, and technical support must be in place to help students, teachers, and administrators use software effectively. General constraints due to lacking financial resources can have a negative impact on the implementation of educational technology and will therefore limit the effectiveness with which technology is used as a means for learning. Schools with inadequate funding will be hard-pressed to purchase technology or to support teachers for advanced technology implementation.

4. Best Practices for Integrating Educational Technology in the Classroom

Technology should be used to support new pedagogical strategies and student-centered instructional practices through the integration of content-driven digital tools and activities that are more likely to result in higher levels of student engagement and achievement. Examples include project-based learning with access to a vast number of resources, data-gathering and manipulation tools, and collaboration with peers, teachers, and experts from around the world. Such applications require the creation of digital portfolios, multimedia presentations, virtual field trips and connections with other learners from different cultures, which are reinvention and transformation teaching activities.

Many teachers view technology as a tool for substituting or augmenting traditional instructional methods with new digital processes designed to teach similar content in a more efficient manner. Substitution and augmentation activities include traditional uses, such as creating word processing documents and PowerPoint presentations. Substitution of low-tech strategies for digital ones compiled of high-tech tools that automate the learning process for students rather than encouraging critical thinking and problem solving that provide richer, more meaningful learning experiences.

5. Future Trends in Educational Technology

To resolve the problems, we must harness the potential of these new technologies for increasing flexibility and independence. Technologies can contribute substantially to the reform of educational institutions. We must design and use these new technologies with exactly this end in mind. The challenge we face is to facilitate this process of educational reform using the intrinsic strengths of the new technologies. Educational technology can be used to introduce new problems of “soft” thinking and “work” thinking that direct teams (including people of all ages and abilities, with different institutional affiliations) to problem solutions. Can electronic technologies, in training schools, ‘re-create society’ to enable teachers to work with children in ways that are impossible at the moment? Technology can enable students to carry on learning safely, knowledgeable about their own activities, and subtly structured by an environment that sets a range of mathematical challenges. It could help tirade to new ‘educational’ activities. Trusted mediators can transform the immediacy and complexity of children’s social interaction and cooperation. This transformation is not dependent on transmitting fleeting social surface but on initiating a deeper kind of cooperation. So that children catch fire with feeling or yearning about internal relationships. Technology artificially compresses the physical space the class needs to flow and changes its shape. Any activity and teaching set in this environment will emerge as the child’s property, with his or her knowledge of the processes involving in enacting it. It could become a profound challenge for both teacher and children, with chains of action resembling the most cherished memories of long-lost achievement and offering extraordinary new resources for children of all abilities. I regard all this not as proposals for remedial work but rather as a challenge of the very first order (not to mention dizzy). It is not fashionable—though perhaps should offer as a service to embrace these far-out issues. We now know, more generally, these questions arise, and that children are stimulated on tasks of virtue, to themselves and to others, yet their solutions demand of the teacher and students a kind of sensitivity that exceeds present models by several degrees of magnitude. As always with remarkable challenges to teachers, the children are eager and able. We need to understand new ways in which technology can inform our work in learning and transformation that are tailored to such ambitious goals. They need to set top-quality challenges that are of genuine educational interest, rather than IT interest— that sort of shift would be the most serious hurdle for IT experts, wouldn’t it? We need to make the most of technology’s capacity to let learning run far ahead of educational activities.

The most pressing problems in introducing new technologies into educational institutions revolve around access and equity. Some, but not all, of these problems might be addressed through other forms of educational reform at the local, state, and national levels. And some may be addressed by new technologies themselves.

What are the challenges in the next decade? The field of educational technology is changing rapidly, and we need to come to terms with both the problems and the potential inherent in the changes. I hoped to have some predictions for the future in this paper, but that is far too ambitious. Nevertheless, I can point to some of the problems, trends, and possibilities that already exist.