Three Reasons to Bring Technology into Class-Guest Post

Three Reasons to Bring Technology into Class
by Richie Lauridsen from Brighthaus.com

From tracking your workouts, updating your networks, viewing a video, or even making a purchase, a lot can happen from a handheld device that most of us carry with us every minute–our phones. As smartphones and wearables continue to become more commonplace, it comes as no surprise that younger generations are required to adapt and understand this technology in unprecedented ways. While technology can certainly be a distraction, baiting kids to text, play, Snapchat or selfie, the ability to harness this technology for education and productivity is vital to our students’ abilities to adapt in the world that lay ahead of them. Below, we go over three distinct benefits to bringing technology into the classroom.

Information Equilibrium: Technology Supports Equity

Technology has often been seen to be a benefit for the elite: Those with economic advantages had access to technology, and only those that belonged to a certain intellectual elite had the capacity to take advantage of new information technology and facilitate its introduction into everyday life. Now, however, technology has become something of a great equalizer, with important technological fundamentals now being seen as increasingly fundamental components of everyday life. In fact, the FCC has even gone so far as to classify access to the Internet as a public utility rather than any sort of luxury commodity.

As the Internet becomes increasingly available to all classes of people, technology and the capacity to understand and use this technology is similarly liberating, providing people from different economic backgrounds access to information, texts, and resources that may have been previously out of reach. The use of technology within the classroom helps to prepare students to better interact with the wealth of information at their fingertips by teaching them to use and understand sites, search engines, and social networks.

According to the Board of Education, nearly two-thirds of educators who use electronic learning resources and technology within their curriculum say that these resources allow them to do more than ever before; the Obama administration is even encouraging a program to bring high speed Internet to schools nationwide.

Economic Relief for Education: The Paperless Pupil

Another understated impact of traditional educational resources is their environmental impact. While textbooks are continually purchased in bulk, used, abused, updated, and eventually discarded for their successors, electronic resources and taking books online offer educators and administrators to help address their environmental footprint alongside their budget’s bottom line.

To enhance the benefits of online educational resources, districts may decide to opt to take key core course curriculum online to encourage students to become more familiar with online resources, save on their printed counterparts, and take advantage of the agility offered to digital course materials. Programs like The CK-12 Foundation offer educators and districts the opportunity to take advantage of extensive resources in math and science free of charge, and have already helped educators with their budget and their coursework by using online textbooks. These can be customized and frequently updated by teachers as needed.

Technology Teaches

As students become increasingly more inculcated into a society that relies on the smartphone, connectivity, and communication online, it is increasingly important that we transform our education so that we communicate in a way that our pupils understand. By moving modules onto a media-based platform, we facilitate our students to activate their brains and learn in a way that offers more comfort and compatibility with the technology shaping our lives.

Interactive modules activate different learning styles. Kinesthetic learners may gravitate toward lessons that give users the opportunity to physically interact and manipulate with the screen to help reinforce key points of the lesson. Experience with different digital interfaces, from social media to video games, also prepares users to experience agile learning environments and different user interfaces that draw upon a complex set of social and technological learning languages. Adapting these strategies into the classroom is a critical bridge for educators to cross to foster the development and success of our students, and ultimately protect our future.