Did Technology Change Education?

Albert Einstein once said:
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

We all know the scene where the teacher lectures from a podium at the front of the room while the students sit in rows and listen. Some of the students have books in front of them and appear to follow along. A few look bored. Some are talking to neighbors. One appears to be sleeping. Laurentius de Voltolina made this illustration in the 14th century. Classrooms today sound pretty much the same as in the 21st century. Let’s ask ourselves why that is.

Thanks to technology, today’s world are very different from the world in the 14th century.
The technology significantly transformedn the industry, medicine, business, etc., but you don’t hear of education anywhere. Why is that? Technology changes significantly impact the world’s economy, corporative management, and global trends. Also, it has great potential to reshape the nature of education and the learning environment. So, why is education the same as in the 14th century? Is the school system wrong? Schools are saying that teachers are not ready to educate themselves when itregardinglogy and that teachers in elementary schools have graded considerably hostile new technologies.

Teachers, Let Me Explain to You

You are confused. There are two different things. The first one is “learning technology” (based on psychological and social-psychological research) which helps to choose contents and goals to design teaching methods and environments for learning. All of this is needed so that students can have better achievements. The other is “delivery technology,” which is necessary for providing an efficient and time-adjusted approach to teaching methods and learning environments. They are both essential but very different regarding their contribution to education. “Delivery technology” impacts costs and access to teaching and information. “Learning technology” allows having an impact on students’ achievements.

We must understand the relationship between technology and learning because, today, that is an everyday thing. Everything that we see or hear comes from some technology. It has an impact on nature and the quality of learning. Teaching and learning, through technology, are changing the way students find out things and supply themselves with skills and strategies for thinking about how to reorganize their time, assignments, etc. All of that significantly improves their performances. Have you felt like this recently? Did school become a place that isn’t built for learning?

So, all of you teachers (who don’t want to improve your knowledge) should be fired, that’s right! No one wants to hear you lecture for 2 hours, give us a bunch of facts, and be like, “here is the test”. We want someone who will be a good teacher, not a great psychologist. Someone who wants to try to understand that technology will not change traditional education and whose activities through technology will improve education.

We are growing up in an environment where tools of communication like email and online forums for discussion allow us to express an opinion. Interactive video contents and chat provide us with a direct learning experience while simultaneously providing us to learn at our own pace.

While doing this research, I went to a few schools to talk to them about this, and surprise, surprise.

Half of them are not even furnished for the next regarding technology. In some countries, students are using books from previous generations. They have few computers, so they are splitting classes into two groups. Did this just become government’s problem? If it is, then why Is this happening? Are they more interested in investing in big shopping malls instead of our most important education? Here are just a few comments from a few schools:

– “Equipment is just not enough. All that we have, we got because we insisted. We were rejected by Ministry for education a few times. We are a small school, but our kids will grow up like everyone. Education should be fun and creative and should make progress.”

– “We have computers for our class in informatics, but they are ancient, the school tried to fix them a few times, but we just don’t have any more money to fix them, even less to buy new ones.”

How is this even possible? The government should make the school a place where they will prepare us for the world that it is. If we survive in the real world, where we use technology pretty much everywhere, we must be prepared. New technologies will keep transforming the world in ways we can’t even imagine. Just look at how the internet works now. And we are still learning about dial-up internet in a time when it is not even used. Why are we sitting in stupid rows as we work in a factory? Why do we still listen to the facts for 45 minutes without real-world application or standardized assessments? Kids carry so many books that their backpacks are more significant than theirs.

Learning is no longer limited to pencil and paper, so why do we still wait for the test, only to see that the year from the previous 3 to 6 generations is still there, so what we didn’t make any progress, not even to make a new question for the test? Or why do we still have to wait a week to find our results?

Do you know that South Korea announced that they would transform their educational system into the most advanced model in the way that you will be able to transfer the entire material to a digital version, available on any device by 2018? All classrooms are going to be digitalized.

Also, Germany is one of the few countries with an awake conscience that the environment in which children learn should be changing and modernizing.

In England, schools have software applications for online testing. Oxford has its application for it.

Of course, I had to look at it. You can order a demo to try it. The market for this is enormous. I found that 93% of employers use this kind of software for online testing (such as YouTestMe, E-sec, Sakai, etc.) to hire or recruit employees. So that means if we leave school with zero knowledge about this, we have only 7% of companies in which we can be hired?

Technology is changing, classrooms are changing, and assessments that schools use are changing.

Government, My, why are we still standing in the same place when everything else is changing?

What do you get from it? GENERATION OF ZOMBIES?

By: V.V.