Such programs evolved into what were later called individualized learning systems ILS. ILS software and hardware were installed in school computer laboratories; they provided drill and practice exercises that were judged valuable, especially for students with learning difficulties. The behavioral movement also had an impact on the educational technology profession. The belief that it was possible to design instruction so that all students could learn led to an interest in the design of learning materials and in a systems approach to instruction.
During the last half of the twentieth century, cognitive theories of learning gained ascendancy over behaviorism among psychologists, and some of the views of cognitive psychologists, represented by the term constructivism, began to influence education.
Constructivists argued that learners must construct their own understanding of whatever is being taught. According to this perspective, the teacher's task is not primarily one of promoting knowledge transfer, nor is it one of ensuring that students perform consistently according to a predetermined description of knowledge and skills.
The teacher's role is to create an environment in which students are able to arrive at their own interpretations of knowledge while becoming ever more skillful in directing their own learning. Many constructivists were initially critical of the use of computers in schools because they equated the use of computers with behaviorist theories of learning. Other constructivists recognized the computer as a potential ally and designed programs that took advantage of constructivist beliefs.
The result has been computer-based programs that promote higher-level thinking and encourage collaborative learning. Whatever learning theory a teacher may embrace, many technologies exist in schools to enhance instruction and to support student learning. While teachers vary greatly in their use of these technologies, teachers select media they believe will promote their instructional goals.
Following are a few examples of computers being used to support four goals: building student capacity for research, making student inquiry more realistic, enabling students to present information in appealing forms, and offering students access to learning resources within and beyond the school.
Student research. Students once relied upon local and school libraries and their printed reference materials to research topics. Now, however, computer technologies provide access to digital versions of these references—and to libraries worldwide.
Encyclopedias on CD-ROMs provide information, digital images, video, and audio, and also provide links to websites where students access tools such as live web cameras and global positioning satellites.
Dictionaries and thesauruses are built into word processors. Through the Internet students can gain access to a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, including government documents, photographs, and diaries. Student inquiry. Educational reformers believe education needs to be real and authentic for students.
Technology can engage students in real-world activities. In the sciences, electronic probes allow science students to collect precise weather or chemical reaction data and digitally trace trends and answer hypotheses.
Graphing calculators, spreadsheets, and graphing software provide mathematics students with the ability to visualize difficult mathematical concepts. In the social sciences, electronic communication tools e. Internet conferencing, e-mail, electronic discussion groups allow students to communicate with their peers from many parts of the world.
In the language arts, students use handheld computers and wireless networks to create joint writing exercises and read electronic books that allow them to explore related topics. Concept-mapping software provides all students with the opportunity to build the framework for a story or report and to map out linkages among complex characters, such as those in a play by Shakespeare.
In the arts, students can explore images of original artwork through the Internet; with appropriate software they can create original digital artwork or musical compositions. Physical education students can use electronic probes to learn about the relationship between the impact of physical movement and physiological changes. Authentic student inquiry extends beyond data collection. It also implies the opportunity for students to investigate questions or issues that concern them.
Communications technology allows students to contact experts such as scientists, book authors, and political leaders. Electronic communication tools support interactions and increase the probability of prompt responses. Students who want to learn more about a current event, such as an experiment on an international space station, scientific endeavors in the Antarctic, an international meeting of environmentalists, or a musher during the Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska, can use the Internet to investigate the topic, participate in a virtual field trip to the event, and watch the event as it unfolds through a web camera.
In this manner, instructional technology assists students who wish to investigate their own questions and concerns. Constructing new knowledge. James Pellegrino and Janice Altman believe the penultimate use of technology occurs when students use technology to move from being knowledge consumers to being knowledge producers.
Results of original student inquiry usually take the form of printed reports or oral presentations. With advanced technologies, students can present their original data or newly interpreted data by integrating digital video, audio, and text into word-processed documents, multimedia presentations, videos, or web-based documents.
Local, state, national, and international media fairs provide opportunities for students to demonstrate the new knowledge representations that students are capable of creating when given the opportunity. Media fairs showcase photographs, original digital images, overheads, videos, and interactive multimedia projects from students of all ages. In the past, award-winning projects have included a video created by fourth graders that demonstrates their feelings regarding acceptance, diversity, and compassion; an interactive, multimedia presentation by second graders about the water cycle; and an interactive multimedia project by a high school student depicting the history of war experienced by one family.
Each of these projects illustrates student-generated knowledge that could have been demonstrated through a traditional paper or research report. However, the instructional technology tools provided students with a way to express their knowledge in a more interesting manner. Access to learning resources. Some schools lack the resources to provide all of the courses that students may need or want.
Advanced placement and foreign language courses can be particularly expensive for a school system to offer when there is not a high level of student demand. A variety of technologies e. Instructional technologies can also serve the instructional needs of students who may be unable to attend classes in the school building.
Students who are homebound, home schooled, or who may be forced to drop out of school can take advantage of course-work offered over the Internet. Virtual high schools, online college credit courses, and for-profit companies all make courses available to students through the Internet.
Through an online program, students can obtain their high school diplomas or GED without attending a particular school. Instructional technologies also provide some students important access to traditional classroom instruction.
Students who have physical or learning disabilities can use a variety of assistive technologies in order to be an active member of a mainstreamed class. Braille writers and screen readers allow students with sight limitations to use a computer for work and communication. Various switches allow students with limited mobility to use a computer to speak for them and complete assignments. Switches, similar to a computer mouse, manipulate the computer through a touch pad, by head or eye movement, or even by breath.
Handheld computing devices and specialized software allow students with learning disabilities to function in traditional classrooms by helping them organize thoughts, structure writing, and manage time. Instructional technology is also used to provide alternative forms of assessment for disabled students, including digital portfolios that electronically capture the accomplishments of students who are not able to complete traditional assessments.
The function of computers in schools differs from that of other educational technologies. In the case of films, radio, instructional television, overhead projectors, and other instructional media, educational technology is used to support and enhance the teacher's role as instructor.
Teacher support has also been one of the justifications for the introduction of computers in schools, but it has not been the only, nor the most important, justification. Computers are also promoted as an important part of the school curriculum. From the hunter-gatherer communities to the invention of agriculture, beginning 10, years ago, people depended on word of mouth communication to acquire vast knowledge of the plants, animals and land on which they depended.
Our understanding about the way schools first operated comes from ancient Greece, in about 4 th century BC. Back then, when schools were available only to the aristocracy, the assumption would have been that leisure was synonymous with learning.
Elsewhere in the ancient world, prominent examples of formal education were evident in the middle east, China and India, and their systems of education generally emphasised reading, writing and mathematics.
In these times, speech was the primary means by which people learned and passed on learning, making accurate memorisation a critical skill. Education in ancient Greece stands out during this era though, because of its diversity. It was the Greeks who first created what we would now call primary and secondary schools. Roman schooling broadly followed the Greek model.
There were small schools for privileged boys, which taught grammar. Then, the boys attended rhetoric schools, to prepare them for public life Thomas, The first examples of educational technology in the ancient world were the tools that students and teachers used for writing. Over thousands of years and across the continents, various surfaces have been used as a medium for writing, including wax-covered writing boards by the Romans , clay tablets in the middle east , strips of bark from trees in Indonesia, Tibet and the Americas , thick palm-like leaves in South east Asia and parchment , made of animal skin common across the ancient world.
Clay tablets were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East. Students in ancient Babylonia and Sumeria inscribed their writing on clay tablets with a stylus. Few would deny that it needs to include technology tools for teaching and learning.
But which tools? How should teachers use them to best serve the needs of a diverse group of learners? Should we set any limits on access? And how might the use of these tools reshape teaching practices? Questions about technology integration persist, even after more than half a century of research documenting the use of technologies such as television and the benefits of using computers for learning.
But for students who have grown up in a digital world, there's no debate. They're already active users of technology outside of school.
The challenge is leveraging the opportunities technology creates to prepare learners for a globally connected, information-saturated world. Seymour Papert , a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among the first to recognize the potential of technology to fundamentally change the learning enterprise. During the s, after collaborating with renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, Papert developed the Logo programming language and began introducing it to children.
Designed to be simple enough for those who do not yet have sophisticated mathematical understanding, Logo enabled students to use the computer to take control of their learning environment. With minimal instruction, they were able to write -- and debug -- programs that controlled the movements of a turtle robot. Drill and practice techniques were common. If the response was correct, additional material would be presented. The first generation of CAI programs used mainframe computers, was very expensive, and did not achieve the expected benefits of improving education through computer-based individualized instruction.
However, this initial introduction of computers in schools spawned interest in a variety of other computer-based applications. In the late s the cost and availability of microcomputers reached a level at which it was more practical to place computers in K schools.
For a variety of reasons, parents, industry leaders, and government officials put pressure on school districts and principals to introduce computers into the schools.
One reason for this computer enthusiasm was the fear that the United States was continuing to fall behind other world powers in terms of technology C.
Hunter, , and teaching students to learn how to use computers seemed like one solution to this problem. Another reason for the external pressure to use computers in schools was the perceived need to teach children job-related skills. In the late s and early s, the importance of computers in the business world increased rapidly.
As a result, teaching students how to use computers provided them with real-world skills and helped them become more competitive e in the job market. Finally, it was argued that computers would make the educational process more efficient.
Many computer advocates argued that a more refined version of the mainframe computer-assisted instruction would allow larger class sizes and, therefore, there would be a need for fewer teachers, since students would be able to rely on the computer for a significant portion of their learning.
For example, if the goal was to teach students how to use a computer so that they could obtain work skills, schools would introduce computer literacy classes into the curriculum. If the goal was to improve instructional efficiency, the computer was used as a tool to teach students the predetermined content. But no matter what the intended uses were, computers entered schools in large numbers during the early s.
Cuban references a survey that found an increase of , computers in schools over the year and a half between fall and spring Between and , that number grew to , computers.
By , there were an estimated 3 million computers in schools Saettler, , p. Much of this growth can be attributed to corporate donations, which companies made in an effort to gain an edge in the educational computing market. In elementary schools, these computers were generally used for repetitive drilling of specific content. In high schools, computers were generally used to teach students computer skills.
By the end of the s, computers came under heavy scrutiny. Government leaders, parents, and school administrators wanted evidence of the effectiveness of using computers in schools. Instead of detailing benefits, researchers revealed a list of obstacles to the use of computers in classrooms. Similar to the problems identified with film, teachers felt that they were generally excluded from the development of instructional software and that the commercially available software generally did not meet their needs.
Again similar to film, teachers also did not have the time or expertise to develop their own computer-based instructional materials. Finally, technical problems further frustrated teachers.
All of these problems contributed to low usage. Saettler estimates that, on average, in the late s, a typical student used a computer for less than 30 minutes a week. In contrast to the s, the s was a decade of new ideas and innovations for computer use in classrooms. With the introduction of color monitors and graphical user interfaces, more interactive and interesting content-based software packages were developed by companies like Tom Snyder Productions.
Schools also began to understand the benefit of helping teachers determine how to integrate computers into their curriculum. While these advances did not correct all the obstacles to computer use identified by teachers during the late s, they reignited interest in instructional uses of computers.
Learning Management Systems LMS , also known as Instructional Management Systems are online collaboration and communication tools which enable administrators, teachers and students to collaborate and communicate online in real-time across geographic distance. Fox, C. The field of cognitive science has exploded over the past decade and computer applications have emerged to take advantage of this new knowledge of how the brain works.
Merging the fields of education and cognitive science has proven to be difficult. For the past decade, Carnegie Mellon has been developing cognitive tools. PAT is computer-based, uses real-world problems, and allows students to use several tools to solve a given problem. One example of a PAT problem is to determine which car rental company should be used on a vacation, given differing cost and terms of agreement information. Feedback is given to the student while he or she is solving the problem, allowing student misconceptions to be addressed while the student is still engaged with the problem.
This information is then used to choose the next problem to be administered and to pace students. The PAT program was first pilot tested in in three Pittsburgh high schools. Since then, the intelligent tutoring tools have been expanded to include a fully developed series of products Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Integrated Math Series and Quantitative Literacy that are being used throughout the country.
Similarly, researchers at the Concord Consortium have been working on an intelligent tutoring device that focuses on genetics and scientific reasoning skills. The system is intended to help eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-grade students learn about genetics through guided exploration. Most often, the system introduces students to new concepts by asking students to explore a specific topic through manipulation of genetic traits of a fictitious species of dragon.
As students work with the system, new concepts are revealed through guided exploration. For example, the first set of explorations during one lesson culminates by asking students to describe how traits are produced in dragons. At times, the learning system presents textual or graphical information to explain concepts and provides students with access to various tools and pieces of information via menu selections.
In addition, the system often asks students to demonstrate their understanding through written responses to specific questions, multiple-choice questions and, most often, the modification of different aspects of genetic codes to create dragons with specific traits or to determine how a trait suddenly appears in a generation of dragons.
From an instructional perspective, Biologica enables students to explore a complex topic via a variety of media and enables teachers to work individually or with small groups of students as questions arise.
Although these tools are being used in a relatively small number of classrooms, they show tremendous promise for using technology as a tool that assists students and teachers in both identifying and correcting misconceptions in a timely manner. Today, the Internet is one of the more popular forms of educational technology used in classrooms. Although some college level courses can be taken online, often without any student-teacher interaction, this type of use is just beginning to penetrate K public schools, particularly at the high school level.
Since then, VHS has grown and served approximately 3, students in more than schools with online courses in Similarly, the Florida Virtual School provides free, online instruction to 6, students enrolled in 65 Florida county school systems. In addition to online courses, there are a variety of ways that the Internet is being used in classrooms. A study by the American Institutes for Research found that students use the Internet for school in the following five ways:.
Teachers also integrate Internet-based activities into their lessons. In some cases, teachers will use data or simulations available on the Internet to demonstrate a concept or work through a problem with the whole class. With the rapid increase in Applets mini-applications that are available on the Internet , teachers have access to powerful tools that enable easy manipulation of data and displays information in a manner that often makes it easier for students to visualize concepts.
As one example, the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative has developed a set of applets that focus on specific statistical concepts www.
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