roles and functions of educational technology in 21st century

1. “Roles and Functions of
Educational Technology in
21st Century Education”

2. • Instruction should be student-centered
• Education should be collaborative
• Learning should have context

3. Instruction should be student-centered

4. Student-centered Instruction is a teaching strategy that
fundamentally breaks many of the traditional boundaries governing
the manner in which students have-by and large-been
and expected to learn for centuries.
Action-oriented:
• Open-ended problem solving requiring critical and creative thinking
• Role playing and participation in simulated situations
• Non-traditional writing assignments
• Collaborative team projects
• Individual, self-paced assignments
• Community engagement and service-learning assignments

5. Student-centered methods have repeatedly been shown to be
superior to the traditional teacher-centered approach to
instruction, a conclusion that applies whether the assessed
outcome is short-term mastery, long-term retention, or depth of
understanding of course material, acquisition of critical
thinking or creative problem solving skills, formation of
positive attitudes towards the subject being taught, or level of
confidence in knowledge or skills.

6. Education should be collaborative

7. In cooperative learning, students work together in a small groups
on a structured activity. They are individually accountable for
their work, and the work of the group as a whole is also assessed.
Cooperative groups work face-to-face and learn to work as a team.
In small groups, students can share strengths and also develop their
weaker skills.
They develop their interpersonal skills. They learn to deal
with conflict. When cooperative are guided by clear objectives,
students engage in numerous activities that improve their
understanding of subjects explored.

8. REASONS
• Learning spaces impact learning: space whether physical or
virtual can have an impact on learning. It can bring people
together; it can encourage exploration, collaboration, and
discussion.
• The power of active learning: “Many of today’s learners favor
active, participatory, experiential learning- the learning style they
exhibit in their personal lives. But their behavior may not match
their self expressed learning preferences when sitting in a large
lecture hall with chairs bolted to the floor”.

9. • Facilitate focus: “Today’s students are being pulled in many
directions- many have to work, there are all of those technology
distractions, attention spans are commonly considered to be
shortening.
• Flexibility: a group of learners should be able to move from
listening to one speaker (traditional lecture) to working in groups
(team or project-based activities) to working independently(writing,
reading, or accessing print or electronic resources). While
specialized places for each kind of work, the flow of activities is
often immediate. It makes better sense to construct spaces capable
of quick reconfiguration to support different kinds of activity.

10. • Comfort- the “living and learning” space: why shouldn’t
students and teachers be comfortable while learning? A
comfortable, fun, flexible learning space can facilitate
dialogue, stimulate the senses, and encourage interactions.
Conversely, discomfort can be a significant distraction to
learning.
• The psychology of learning environments: The book offers
numerous insights that help to illuminate the impact of
learning environment design on student’s ability and desire
to learn.

11. • De centeredness: “Emphasizing the principles of socio
constructivism, spaces must convey co-learning and co-
construction of knowledge. Implications for architecture include
thinking of the whole campus as a learning spaces rather than
emphasizing classrooms. Within the classroom, it means
avoiding the message that the room has a front or a
“privileged” space”.
• Community: Learning has been a community activity for
hundreds of years. A social setting encourages social learning.
We need to continue to evolve learning spaces that encourage
connections, not compartmentalization.

12. Many consider Vygotsky as the father of “social learning”.
Vygotsky was an education rebel in many ways. Vygotsky
controversially argued for educators to assess student’s ability to
solve problems, rather than knowledge acquisition.
The idea of collaborative learning has a lot to do with Vygotsky’s
idea of the “zone of proximal development”. It considers what a
student can do if aided by peers and adults. By considering this
model for learning we might consider collaboration to increase
student’s awareness of other concepts
Cited
From: https://plus.google.com/u/0/101796324413630088793#ix
zz3ymKvH5qo

13. Learning should have context

14. Learning should have context
First, there’s the question of what students are made to learn, which
often is more oriented to factual material than to a deep
understanding of ideas. Second, there’s the question of how
students are taught, with a focus on passive absorption: listening to
lectures, reading summaries on textbooks, and rehearsing material
immediately before being required to cough it back up. Third
there’s the question of why a student has learned something:
Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been acquired so
that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in the
context of pursuing projects and solving problem that are
personally meaningful.

15. This view of learning is the information processing perspective, which
considers learning as a change in knowledge in our stored memory.
When we pay attention to inputs into our sensory register, these inputs
(or information) become part of our working(short-term) memory. To
retain this information, it needs to be encoded as a schematic into our
stored (long-term) memory. Then we need to be able to retrieve this
information from our stored memory to use it later.
Teachers can support students to process information by helping them
to organize new information, link it to their existing knowledge and
use memory aids to retrieve information. Digital learning resources
and computer software can be use to facilitate these processes.