Tuesday 16 January 2018

Change The Way You Teach When Using Technology

The past 10 years have seen a surge in student-centered learning, and the integration of technology into the classroom makes it increasingly easy to create engaging lessons that reach a variety of learners in a variety of ways.
  1. Education Now Happens in Classrooms Without Walls
Teachers can continue to communicate and teach outside the classroom. 
This means that teachers have to be increasingly more communicative, more plugged into the community in which they teach or live, and be willing to showcase connections between the classroom and the world around the students. 
  1. Textbooks May Be Obsolete
Thanks to technology, many schools are no longer ordering or relying on traditional textbooks.  Instead, it is up to teachers to sift through the content on the internet, or on education websites, to find real world materials that showcase the content being taught in the classroom. Teachers can no longer rely on reading a chapter and then answering the textbook questions.  Instead, technology is encouraging educators to become more proactive in find reading materials that are authentic and relevant, and engage students on a deeper level.
  1. Technology Makes it Easy to Flip Classrooms
Instead of teaching the content and then assigning homework, technology enables teachers to provide instructional materials (presentations, recorded lectures, PowerPoints or presentations, YouTube videos, etc) for the students to peruse on their own time and at their own pace. This means that teachers then become guides and resources for the practice work – classwork now that used to be homework – showing the students how to best use the information they took in.  The function of the teacher is no longer to impart information, but to guide students in making the best use of the information they read and learn.
  1. Collaboration is Increasing: MathsRepublic is a Leader 
Teachers no longer need to teach in a vacuum! Teachers can collaborate across content areas, grade levels, even across geographical distances. Teachers can communicate with one another to make cross-curricular experiences that will solidify student learning and find experiences that will help their students in real-world situations. It also means that they can give their students opportunities to learn from others in both similar and different life situations, cultures, and locations.  Teachers become facilitators for students’ experiences.
  1. Learning Can Be More Personalized
Technology makes it easy for teachers to tweak lessons and materials to each individual student’s’ needs and interests. With technology, a teacher is responsible for differentiating his or her lessons so that every student receives the greatest depth and breadth of understanding.
  1. Teachers Can Give More  Meaningful Feedback
Teachers can now measure individual student learning through communication and the near-constant feedback of computers. 
  1. Classroom Management Strategies are Shifting
With technology, students always have the opportunity to be engaged, even when a teacher needs to deal with one individual student. In the past, if a teacher needed to stop class to address a student behavior, everyone else had to wait until the teacher had returned to the task at hand to move forward. Now, forward progress continues, regardless of to whom the teacher is speaking or why. But more than that, technology can impact how classrooms are managed.  From planning to engaging to monitoring, teachers can use apps and technology to make sure that students are on task and engaged, thus reducing misbehaviors.

Technology is here to stay. And even though it presents its own unique array of challenges, it pushes teachers to stay creative, to meet students on their home field, and to innovate. From the information taught to the method of delivery to managing the students’ behavior and achievement, technology helps teachers make the most of class-time.