Technology Trends Paper

Lisa Bartels, Steph Holthaus, Jackie Kentfield, Melissa Schindler

TEAC 259 sec. 003

September 17, 2009

Instructional Technology Trends

In today’s world, technology is used in almost every aspect of life. It can play a huge role in the classroom as far as learning and teaching. Teachers can use technology to give their lessons to their students and to complete their own daily lesson plans. Students can use it to receive information from their teachers and to complete their assignments. Today’s students are growing up in a world where technology is used often in everyday life. They are also going to be employed in the future when technologies will be even more advanced. Therefore, it is important for students to stay up-to-date with current technologies and be skilled at using them.

According to the standards developed by the International Technology Education Association (ITEA), there are certain things that students need to attain academic achievement in the 21st Century. These include Digital-Age literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication, and high productivity. In order to be successful academically in modern society, students should meet all these standards. It is the role of the teacher to help his or her students to do this.

In order to help students to become familiar and comfortable with using technology, teachers should use it frequently in everyday classroom learning. For example, instead of doing a traditional classroom demonstration, a teacher could find a YouTube video online that would demonstrate the skill they are trying to teach. Teachers could also require their students to use technology when completing or submitting their assignments (i.e. requiring students to make a video for an assignment or asking them to keep a blog to post their assignments in). The more students are exposed to technology in the classroom, the easier they will find it to use.

Technology can be extremely useful as a tool for teaching. For example, if a science teacher wanted her students to learn the elements in the Periodic Table today, she could email them the graph and her students could come up with a way of memorizing the elements. In the future, the teacher could use E-Learning to teach her students the elements. She could find a song or video online that presents a pneumonic device for memorizing the Periodic Table. The students could then go online an download the song or video and then use it to help them study.

Another way for a teacher to teach her students the Periodic Table is to stand up in front of the classroom and do a traditional lecture. Here, the students would have to take notes, listen, and learn. This is how they would memorize the elements. However, in an increasingly technological society, this method of teaching is sometimes considered outdated. In the future, instead of listening to a traditional lecture, students could upload the information onto their mobile device and study it from there. They may even be able to answer test questions this way, taking the learning experience out of the classroom completely.

Using technology in the classroom is an excellent way to keep teaching and learning up to date. It can provide advantages like simplifying and speeding up the teaching and learning process. Because technology is becoming more and more important in today’s society, it is important for students to be familiar and comfortable with it. Therefore, teachers should encourage their students to use it on a daily basis.