Education and Technology

 

Thanking Activity: ELT

Here I'm going to write about Education and Technology..

   Changing Education Paradigms is a narrative from Sir Ken Robinson that provides an inspirational insight and overview of the current worldwide education structure, the effects that it is having on our school kids and society, and an invitation to consider what it would take to shift the current industrial concept of schooling to a more sustainable one.

        As we proceed through the 21st Century we are constantly being presented with a raft of radical advancements, learning curves and developments in our technological use and capability. This in turn has a similarly radical impact in terms of change to pedagogical practice and education. In our current technological society, normal is a forever expanding concept. As individuals we are constantly distracted in and by our everyday lives and the technology that we wrap around ourselves.

  

In the video "Build a School in the Cloud", by Sugata Mitra, a professor in New Delhi, Mitra explains that due torecent technological advances it is nownecessary more than ever to changeour education system. In the past, therewere many individuals who did notknow that something like a computereven existed, but in today's modernage smart watches as well as smartphones are ithe tip of everyone 'sfingers.

 Today's children have grown up with technology in their hands. I agree withMitra's ideas represented in "Build aSchool in the Cloud", because the bestway for children to learn is oncomputers by themselves instead of being forced to do so. In the video,Mitra's experiment illustrates that computers will help children learn efficiently. He decided to execute the"hole in the wall" experiment, in whichhe would installa computer in a wall.While conducting this experiment,Mitra placed a computer in a wall thatwas surrounded by individuals living inpoverty. In this particular area, childrendid not know how to read, write, or usea computer. 

Mitra wanted to change the modernschooling way that stared years ago byintroducing SOLE. SOLE is a self-organized learning environment inwhich teacher lets the students learnon their own. By looking at the resultsof the hole in the wall experiment,"Build a school in the Cloud" was formed. This was a way to helpeducators run their own SOLE. SOLE gives children freedom of learning ontheir own and it is a way for studentsto share and discover new things. Theidea of "Build a school in the Cloud" isa great way for children to learn ontheir own and not be punished for seeking education. 

   One theme permeates the above mentioned teaching and learning models: they emphasize reaching beyond the classroom and giving students more control to develop their innate curiosity, creativity and find the answers themselves.

Mitra’s premise is that schools are still operating on a 19th century factory model designed to spit out workers with the same skills. He encourages teachers and parents to break free of that model and do a better job at sparking children’s curiosity and agency.

Mitra has launched a SOLE toolkit to help parents and teachers do that.

He is also using his TED Prize winnings to build The School in the Cloud, “a learning lab in India where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. A global network of educators and retired teachers will support and engage the children through the web.

   In this TED talk, Salman Khan talks about how Khan Academy is being used personalize instruction in mathematics by “flipping” instruction. Students watch Khan Academy lectures outside of class, enabling them to proceed through the lecture at their own pace. Students then complete exercises which give the instructor information on which concepts they understand and which are presenting difficulties. In class, students work with each other to solve problems and peers help each other work through difficulties.

  In this TEDTalk Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, talks about the need to create alternative access to classroom content and how videos can be used to flip a classroom. While showing the power of interactive exercises, Salman argues for a change in the teaching paradigm: Using technology to "humanize" the classroom by flipping the traditional classroom script give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher as a facilitator, coach and mentor.

   

Today‟s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn like all immigrants, some better than others to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their accent that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today‟s older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

To keep up with trends, digital immigrants nowadays are actively involved in performing day-to-day activities and learning using technology. A research finding shows that older adults have a positive attitude towards using learning technology to perform their daily activities or interests such as sending emails or surfing online. Nevertheless, the learning process is a struggle with complex emotions and different task-achievements.