The main job of a teacher is to help students understand specific subject matter. So technology has to be tailored or used just to make this process easier for the teacher. What people do not know , is that technology is just a tool, on its own it can not help a lot, but the way we use it, is what makes it useful. Either teachers use technology or not in the classroom, students will need to learn and these students will need extra effort and help from their teachers. As a teacher, you will need to know what students need to learn and specify which technology you will need to use during the process of teaching.
Measure the effectiveness of various technologies in students’ learning process. Then compare student’s performance as to when their was no technology in the classroom and when technology is introduced in the classroom. In most cases, non-performing students will seem active when technologies like projectors and smart white boards are used to illustrate subjects, these students will be taken up by the functionality of the technology which might help them learn faster and easily.
The Role of the teacher towards using technology is to learn how each piece of technology works and find ways on how to use that technology in their classrooms. This can demand for personal research and training of teachers, because they need to be tech literates. We have technology tools like computers, internet, mobile phones, smart whiteboards, projectors, electronic smart papers and much more.
Teachers should take off time to study the way these tools work and device techniques which help them use these tech tools to make their job easier in the classroom. Teachers have a big task of making sure that each student learns a specific subject, they have to monitor the performance of their students, they have to assign work to each of these students, they need to have a one-on-one communication with their students so that they get to know the weakness of their students and find ways of helping them. This is a lot of work and technology can simply and cut down all these tasks. Below I have listed a few detailed points on how teachers can use technology in their classrooms:
- Administration and monitoring student performance: Teachers can use online technology tools and computers to administer and track the performance of their students. One of the most important online tools teachers can use to administer and keep up with their students is Piazza.com. This application will allow teachers to manage course work and also enable them to answer questions asked by their students. Teachers can create classrooms on this platform, and posts subjects to be discussed on, then students in the classroom can get involved and exchange ideas about that particular subject. For the shy students they will have a chance to be anonymous during the discussion, they can set a different name on the platform so this can help them hide their identity yet get involved in an academic discussion. Display content and visual illustrations – projectors and white boards: The advantage of using such online educational application, is that , they can be used even on mobile phones of portable tablets, so teachers can easily interact with their classroom at any time.
- Use Internet for research purposes and to drive real-time examples to students: Teachers can use the internet in the classroom to conduct research on specific subjects and derive real-time examples to their students. To achieve this, a teacher can decide to use a computer, a projector and a white board to display live data from the internet to the students in the classroom. Teachers can use websites like ‘‘Youtube.com‘‘ to illustrate subjects in a video format and this will take the students attention which will improve on the way students learn while in the classroom. Our brains can easily remember visual effects, because we even get flashbacks of those images or videos while not in the classroom.
- Create a class website or blog and post assignments, provide file downloads and arguments on various academic topics: Teachers can use free CMS (content management systems) like wordpress.com or blogger.com. These platforms can allow you to create a free website using a sub-domain name. For example, if your an English teacher, you can set a free classroom blog with a name like ‘‘learnbritishenglish.wordpress.com’’, then use this free website to publish assignments which can be printed out by students. On the same website or blog, you can create a section for download, were you can put important links to relevant e-books which can help your students learn more about specific subjects. You can also link some parts of your content to important topics on sites like Wikipedia, so that students can use those links to learn more about a particular subject. Use study games to make learning interesting :
