Educational Technologies

Teaching no longer means sitting and listening to a teacher feed you the knowledge and it is not what students expect or want from their educations anymore either. Learning needs to be relevant to both topic and delivery, or the students disengage from the learning and turn to their mobile devices. Many educators are of the opinion that they are using these devices for entertainment only, but that is not necessarily the case. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2002) college students use their devices for many educational functions:

Ø  79% agree that Internet use has had a positive impact on their college academic experience.

Ø  73% say they use the Internet more than the library for information searching.

Ø  68% of college students reported subscribing to one or more academic-oriented mailing lists that relate to their studies.

Ø  65% of college students who email professors say they report absences via email.

Ø  58% of college students have used email to discuss or find out a grade from an instructor.

Ø  48% are required to use the Internet to contact other students in at least some of their classes.

Ø  46% agree that email enables them to express ideas to a professor that they would not have expressed in class.

These numbers come from 14 years ago, and mobile devices are more prevalent now than they were then. The question is no longer about if mobile devices and the Internet should be used in education but how do we show learners the best ways to find information through them. Teachers are supposed to educate learners to help them fit into the world around them, and we cannot do this by depriving them of the primary means of communication and learning in the world right now.

Laptop/Tablet/Smart Phone

These are nearly the same thing anymore as far as what they can do performance wise. A phone can be used to write quality academic papers as easily by some as on a computer. To younger learners there is virtually no difference between any of these technologies. One thing is quickly becoming obvious to me though; learning has become physically fluid. Learning happens all around us all of the time and with the aid of mobile devices, even formal education is no longer confined to desks. All three devices can run the same operating systems with newer models, so having to switch from one to another becomes less about the hardware involved and more about the cloud they save it to for access from anywhere.

While these devices can be disruptive, there are fewer chance students will wander to them for entertainment if we make the learning involved and exciting. Instead of forcing older methods of learning like taking notes by hand let them type or record, there is no harm in it, and it is how the majority of learners naturally function now. Taking that away from them is disruptive to their usual ways of learning and interacting with the world around them which is also destructive to quality learning. Students need to learn how to learn not what to know what they need to know is also fluid depending on advances in their fields, technology, and human understanding.

In my classes, I would allow and encourage the use of their devices as they wished. I would also make sure there were multiple open communication avenues between students and myself through these devices. I would make sure all of my materials were not just scanned and available but were instead available in formats that are engaging and draw the learner into the topic. Mobile devices allow people to connect in ways that were not possible previously. There is a global shift to shared learning and knowledge that education needs to not only embrace but help lead the way to these new information gathering and learning technologies.

Search Engines

I picked search engines as my educational software technology of choice because it can access all of the other software options. Search engines are the highway to the Internet and everything it offers. They take learners to the websites, scholarly search engines, and wikis where at least 73% of college students begin looking for information (Jones, 2002). Search engines can help learners find apps that they can use for communication such as Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, or Skype. They allow people to find a topic and sort by the media format they prefer such as website, video, images, maps, and more. Understanding how to search properly can make a world of difference between finding unsupported opinion and evidence based facts, and they can mean the difference between finding creative commons materials that are free to use (such as the graphics above) and copyrighted materials that could cause ethics issues. They can be as useful or hazardous as the user makes them depending on their understanding of it. That is why I feel it is so important to teach good internet navigation skills and research practices.

In my classes, I would make sure my students understood the basics of search engine use. I would also provide links to search engines that were specific to their lines of study because they are usually better suited for finding useful information because of peer and professional review and usage. I would make sure they were aware of sub-search engines. For example, Google is a search engine, but there is also Google Scholar, which contains only scholarly peer reviewed materials. I would also provide a link to an article such as this which shows how to input a search effectively to get what you seek without non-relevant searches also coming up. Using the right search engine and using it effectively would remove a lot of the fears educators have about the credibility and reliability of the sources of information. Before that can happen though more educators need to see the Internet and its abilities as extensions of their teaching toolkit instead of something to fear and avoid because our younger learners will not relate to us or our teaching otherwise.

Reference

Jones, S. (2002, September 15). The Internet Goes to College. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2002/PIP_College_Report.pdf.pdf.