It goes without saying that technological advances which have so far been used have gone a long way toward facilitating teaching and learning and make the classroom a much more modern and advanced environment to be working in for both students and teachers alike. However, on the other side of the coin, there also exists some situations in which the technology being used does not have as good influences on learners as expected.
In my own learning experience, technology-aided teaching has become a very common term to teachers of all teaching contexts, from elementary, middle, high school to university. Every year teachers are required to teach a number of lessons with the help of technology, which in my country would be automatically associated with the use of computers. However, what happened when i was in high school was as students we were mostly attracted by the fancy power-point presentation, how the animations were created and how vivid the animated effects were than the lesson itself. Once in my Mathematics class our teacher showed us a demonstration of how a certain type of graph was made and changed and it was so amazing that the whole class turned into a chaos of discussion about which shape the moving graph made right after that. It then took my teacher nearly 10 minutes to get everyone's attention back. Also, there were times when the power-point presentation went too fast that we felt like in a rush, which was affected by the fact that it was hard for teachers to estimate the time for students to take notes when he had had everything beforehand and did not write the stuff himself. Besides, the use of technology sometimes put into question the role of the teacher in the class. I had a couple of teachers who did nothing in class but read from his/her power-point.
Luckily, these incidents happened less often in my language classes. Still, it did occur that sometimes we students felt we missed out on emotional interaction, especially eye contacts with the teacher because she/he was more busy operating the technological equipments.
All of the above is just taken from my own experience and they surely do not speak for any conclusion or theory. It may be just a reminder that no matter how advanced and developed technological achievements are, they can never take the place of the human figure of the teacher in the classroom, since it's because of teacher-student interaction that people are going to school for.
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2 comments:
"I had a couple of teachers who did nothing in class but read from his/her power-point". I think that if this is all that teachers are doing then they should just put these power-points online and not waste their students' time. I think it's very important for a teacher to ADD something to a class beyond their assigned readings and assignments. Otherwise technology just turns them into their lesson plan and very little is actually gained by the students.
There is certainly a lot to be said about using PowerPoint effectively and in a pedagogically sound manner. Teachers can provide the PowerPoint ahead of time so that students don't have to copy down what the PowerPoint says. Also, PowerPoint presentations should be very short. The elaboration comes from the presenter.
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