What clearly comes across from all of the comments of our classmates is that everyone is in agreement that technology is a powerful tool for effective teaching. As of now, each one of us is using technology for personal use in some form or the other, whether for communication, e-banking, facebooking or simply playing games.
There appears to be a clear understanding of how technology can be used effectively in a classroom and a range of ideas have been expressed. However, it appears that most of us currently only use basic technology in our lesson - for example, we use the MS Office applications largely in classrooms to present work and research for lesson ideas. So hopefully with our increased awareness of what benefits technology can give will come an increased awareness of how we can use technology in a much wider context to benefit all.
There have been some contributions from class mates currently working in International schools who are using the bluetooth to share documents with students, using the Moodle platform, etc which shows that some schools have already adopted technology and moving at a dynamic pace.
Someone mentioned that technology is a great tool for children with learning challenges. In fact, it does play an important role in promoting inclusive education. Two important aspects of inclusion are most likely to benefit from the advancement of technology: social integration, developing students with disabilities’ social relationships with peers and adults; instructional integration, teaching students based on a curricular designed to meet their needs (Ryan & Paterna, 1997; Villa, Thousand, Meyers, & Nevin, 1996; Wilson, 1999 as cited in Friend and Bursuck, 2002). Technology opens up new opportunities and media by which students with special learning needs (e.g., language impairment) could communicate with other students. Technology facilitates the adaptation and accommodation in curriculum and assessment made according to the diverse individual learning needs of the students. Technology allows us to cater for different learning paces, learning styles, and provides an array of options for assessment for and of learning. These changes not only facilitate the learning of students with special educational needs but can also benefit all students as we believe that all students have individual learning needs.
In conclusion, what comes across clearly is that most of us would benefit from accessing and using all the various technological tools, so that we do not restrict ourselves to only using the tools that we are comfortable with. At the same time, technology offers both opportunities and challenges. While technology expands our horizons and expose us to new possibilities, critical and analytical thinking and self-control are called for in face of an enormous amount of information available that was never possible without the technological changes. As teachers, we need to help our students to be well-equipped with both the knowledge and virtues for them to benefit from the new era of technology.
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