Sunday, December 13, 2009

Is technology making a diffrence in student learning?

Why do you as an educator feel that all this good technology out their has not had a greater impact in the classroom then it has. Lack of support, Lack of training, Lack of time. What are some of the reason that you see this trend happening.
Dr. Schmoker is a supporter of the work by Jim Collins “Good to Great” Jim talks to the his research that showed that Good to Great Companies where not made by the use of Technology. He suggest that it only allows companies to do things quick and they would have made it to the same place of greatness without it. Dr. Schmoker in his keynote in Lansing took it one step further and made claim that technology has no impact on student learning. I think this is taking it a little to far. I do believe that technology has had an effect on student learning. For one if you get a student engaged in learning with the use of technology, then it has had some impact on learning. In fact at his lecture he was using these tool to more effectively communicate to the group, a Video Projection unit, a Document Camera like an Elmo, and a microphone. Also during the event they used turnpoint clickers to take some quick sample surveys. This is a great example of good use of technology. It is a great way to have an impact on student learning. In some of the sessions they took pretest and post test to check for understanding of the training with these units. If you had to you could have done this with paper and pencil but it would of taken much longer to find the results. This way the instructors could retouch on content that talked about and may have been misunderstood on.
So what is you opinion on this leave me a comment or email me at sharpsrtf@gmail.com

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