The Summit Point Of Education
To prepare children for the new age of technology British schools have spent a total of £900 million each year to upgrade the classroom. In recent years technology has made tremendous strides traditional methods of learning are slowly being pushed out. Though the use of webcams, teachers can bring in assistance from all over the world into their classroom.
ease has created a misconception of what technology is capable of. It seems that all that needs to be done to improve education is to place a child in front of a computer and let the digital world do the teaching. This is referred to as the Everest Syndrome, feeling the need to use technology simply because it exists and overestimating what it can do. As Clebourne D. Maddux put it ‘Deliver us from educational nirvana merely by existing’. Reading from a tablet is considered to be ‘more advanced’ than reading from paper and thus must have hidden benefits. Teachers are something more of a guide to students, explaining to students how these pieces of technology function.
Recently the OECD educational director Andreas Schliecher has said that this approach has failed to make the impact that schools have hoped. Specifically says that school technology has raised too many false hopes.
PISA Results:
If we look at the best preforming schools in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), East Asian schools have frequently been at the top. Whereas England has had no noticeable improvements any of the three PISA categories compared to previous years.
Andreas Schliecher makes this comparison by saying that East Asian countries have been cautious about using technology in their classrooms. Futher to this Schliecher states that students who frequently use computers at school ‘Get worse’. Although this isn’t all bad as moderate use of computers in the classroom has presented ‘Somewhat better learning outcomes’.
The socio-economic gap between students has widened from technological usage. There has been no school where increased technology use has drastically improved student performance.
Mathematics learning:
Mathematics by far is the UK’s weak spot in competitive international assessment and has only suffered from technology usage. Critics of a technological approach to maths have claimed that the effort to make maths more interesting has only complicated it further.
Previously in mathematics the real world and the class room functioned on two different levels. Within the classroom people do the maths and in the ‘real world’ computers do the maths.
Presently in orders to catch up to the ‘real world’ students are not only being taught formulas and equations, now they are being taught how computers can calculate this.
Technological empowerment is not what Leon Henkin envisaged when the calculator was integrated into the classroom in the year 1996. Henkin called them the largest obstacle in understanding in mathematics.
Trends for the future:
The educational system has been placed in an awkward position in recent years. There is a desire to drastically improve our global ranking (which didn’t happen) whilst simultaneously reducing educational funding. The book ‘Oversold and Underused’ also highlights the uncertainty of what the future of technology in education should be. It argues that some promoters want technology to increase educational production. Others what technology to create a student centred learning environment.
Finally working with technology would make students sufficiently computer literate to function in a changing work place. This has forced schools to become more creative in how to deliver the curriculum. Use of technology does allow this to happen, children are more engaged when they can gain some kind of entertainment out of learning. Both learning and entertainment no longer have to be mutually exclusive experiences. We’re being reassured that technology is enriching our students and preparing them for the new age.
Currently technology is only automating what schools were already doing and rarely expanding student’s ability to learn. Reading off a tablet doesn’t house any unique experiences that can’t be gathered from a text book. Schools should not hoard all this technology in the hopes that they’ll suddenly have the best education in the world. As the OECD educational director has said, this doesn’t work. Other factors contribute to the success of school such as attendance rate and the quality of the teachers. No amount of tablets and smart boards are going to help British schools if there is no one there to be taught. If schooling because too technology based, poorer schools won’t be able to keep up with the demand will be left behind. Education will improve with the help of technology once it’s been figured out what exactly we want it to do.
Share This Article
