Technology in Learning and Teaching Environments - Research Proposal Example

Modern Technology in Teaching and Learning Environments Name Institution Date Course Modern technology to reduce barriers of successful science teaching and learning environment Introduction Technological advancements have continued to be witnessed in the recent years with their impact not just in the industrial world but even in academics. The advent of the internet has revolutionized the education sector worldwide. Several other technological advancements have been witnessed both in class and laboratory. They have continued to change traditional way of learning bringing a new feel and experience in learning and teaching science. The question that emerges is whether the technological advancements in the field of academics mean improvement in learning and teaching experiences of science. This paper proposes that these technological improvements will go a long way to remove the barriers previously witnessed in science teaching and learning environment and greatly contribute to successful teaching and learning science. Background information Traditional teaching methods required face-to-face interaction between the students and teachers. It was also characterized by a lot of paper work. This has however changed somewhat. The 20th century has been characterized by great improvements in technology not just in the industrial world, but across and fields. The century has seen development of learning aids and investigative and analysis equipment that have been incorporated into the learning and teaching programs. Calculators, probes, computers and many more equipment for analysis and graphical representations have revolutionized the education sector. The internet has had far greater effects to the teaching and assessment programs currently used by institutions and in a big way contributed improvement of teaching programs as well as learning experience. This paper proposes that modern technology has reduced the barriers of successful science teaching and learning environment. Problem statement Technology has continued to present new ways of doing things. In the teaching and learning of science, technology has played a continually changing role. That is not understood is whether or not modern technology reduces the barriers of successful science teaching and learning environment. This research therefore seeks to find out the role of modern technology in reducing these barriers and its contribution in successful teaching and learning of science. Objectives Mani objective: To determine the role of modern technology in reducing the barriers of successful science teaching and learning environment Specific objectives: To find out whether or not modern technology helps minimize the challenges experienced by science students and teachers. To find out the role of modern technologies in improving student understanding and appreciation of the things they are taught. To determine any possible design improvements, if any, that may be incorporated into the new technology approaches of teaching to achieve successful teaching and learning experience. Research questions While investigating the role of modern technology in reducing the barriers to learning and teaching science, the following questions will be used to guide the investigation: How does the modern technology assist disadvantaged students achieve their learning goals? Does the modern technology make it easy for students to learn and understand whatever they are taught at school? Does modern technology make teacher’s work easier while they deliver content and information to students? How has modern technology improved access to education? Methodology The research will seek to find out the answers to the above questions by employing several approaches, using both primary and secondary sources. The main approach will be through carrying out extensive literature review on the subject to find out the trends in previous research findings. The research will be carried out on research journals and books. Historical journals will also be used. The project will also involve information finding from individual students and teachers to assess their personal experiences. This will be achieved through oral interviews that will be carried out by the researcher as well as through use of questionnaires that will be designed to contain specific questions on their personal experiences. Questionnaires will be sent to those who will not be able to have oral interviews. In order to encourage respondents answer fully, the questionnaires will be open ended. Scope The literature review will involve as many literature materials as possible. Historical as well as research journals will be reviewed and analyzed. Other books on technological advancements in teaching will also be reviewed. The research will also seek information from students in high schools as well as those in higher institutions of learning. The research will target 450 students as well as 50 teachers and administrators who will respond to either the oral interviews or questionnaires. Literature Review Collins and Halverson (2009) argue that technologies have taken very different evolutionary dimensions in school as well as out of the schools. Already accepted is the growing need for educational experiences. Learners continue to grow passions in a manner that is not demographic. Educators will therefore have to incorporate flexibility in their education delivery programs since the meaning of access to education has become quite individual and these individuals want to make their own decisions as far as their private and public life is concerned. Although some obstacles exist against the use of technology in education (Bingimlas, 2009), studying these obstacle will provide the best way of overcoming these barriers and adopting successful technologies for the future. The advent of the internet and its use in the academic field continues to be embraced by more learning institutions as they strive to enhance their service delivery and teaching approaches to address the needs of the varied student needs. The internet will continue to provide a wealth of resources and techniques, serving as a source of new teaching practices as well as new methods for adoption into the various teaching and learning approaches. Put in another way, the internet technology will allow students and teachers to keep up with their minds. They will be able to try out their ideas as soon as they come up with them. The internet has enable development of online courses and students have appreciated the choice, convenience as well as the flexibility of the online courses. Instructional designers explain that these courses will provide a standardized framework and increase flexibility. Instructors believe online courses are convenient, noting the reduced travel and ease of record keeping. Administrators on the other hand like the benefits that range from consistent assessment of information that is automated, and the reduced costs that these programs can bring to the learning institutions. Online teaching also facilitates creative dialogue between the students and teachers and as gone beyond just putting lecture notes online. The development of these programs therefore means that high quality educational programs will be able to be undertaken from anywhere, anytime, and this has been particularly beneficial to at-risk learners (Funk, 2005). According to SEDL (2003), these are learners faced with challenges that range from low socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency, and single head of household, disabilities, psychological factors, minority group status and gender. Properly developed online programs designed to remove the barriers experienced by such learners will be successful by achieving lower attrition. For the disabled, it may be difficult to use print format resources like books due to difficulties in navigation or turning pages. Properly designed curricular have however incorporated technologies enabling the disabled to navigate and express themselves through voice activated switches, expanded keyboards and others (Rose & Gravel, 2010). Online courses therefore mark a new wave of higher education technological development. Students do not have to work on paper, making the process transportable and organized, opening more possibilities in evaluation and assessment of programs as well as how accreditation takes place. Technological advancements have however had far greater impacts in learning and teaching of science (Lefebvre et. al. 2006). According to Wallace (2002), science teachers have maintained a leading edge in the use of technology and incorporating modern technological products into their teaching. He argues that technology has found use in labs and physical experiments. As early as the 1980s science teachers have used probes and microcomputer based labs to collect data. For further advancement in the use of technology in teaching science, Wallace (2002) points out that teachers should be able to identify and develop those technologies into tools that will be meaningful in learning science. The teachers will also need the proper portfolio of technologies that will engage the students in effective learning. Teachers therefore need to know curriculum-based technologies that will work with the students’ needs as well as the way teachers teach. Still, teachers do not need to know everything about technology in order to deliver; they need a repertoire of those technologies that they can teach with, a selection of items that will fit within the curriculum and those that are available. Owing to the rapid change in technologies and computers, administrators and teachers should focus on working with the technologies that are available but they should not worry about what they cannot do. Schools have already embraced technologies that offer possibilities for meaningful learning in science (Wallace, 2002). The general implication is that teachers must not be technological experts in order to use it in teaching. Gibson (1977) gives an analogy between the use of technology in teaching and learning with affordance. In this context, he explains affordance to represent some possibility facilitated by an object, though not necessarily required. According to Wallace (2002), technology can afford opportunities for science education students to engage in effective learning in through enhancing representation. For science learning, the development of technology has enabled representation of ideas and processes that would otherwise be impossible to represent. Technology has been used in class and labs to simulate and model processes that would ordinarily take place on real time. Science students are also able to model complex systems like stream ecology or predator prey system and in this way gain more understanding of the concepts in the topical area as well as investigative scientific processes. Handheld devices like calculators and PDA’s have helped students measure and record data such as the oxygen content, temperature and PH of water. Probes connected in computers have also been used to achieve temperature change recording and other variables with real-time output graphs. By this way, technology gives students the opportunity to have a graphical display that improves their understanding of the collected data as well as the ideas entailed by the activities. The technologies also help avoid challenges that were previously experienced during data collection that included too much time wasting and inaccuracies during collection and graphing. Technology has also enabled and will continue to enable running of simulations during the teaching of science (Halverson & Smith, 2009). Several simulations including accurate frog dissections, sheep brain, cow eyes and fetal pigs are available online. These and much more are also available in CDs and DVDs. Students can therefore access these simulations and continue to study even out of class. Traditional learning had to include sessions where students dissected real animals in labs. This was not only time consuming, but left several animals dead and was associated with high costs of maintaining these animals preserved for dissection classes. The use of real animals was also a source of controversial arguments but as Cavanaugh (2002) observes, the use of real dissections together with the simulations provides a good learning experience. The advent of the internet gave students wide access to information and data that was previously not possible. Science students can now access up-to the minute information of weather, current earthquake data from across the world as well as several other contents that they use for learning. This access is important since students can study things that they have interest in and those that motivate them. The internet also gives students content and resource that may not be available at the school’s old and outdated textbooks. Technology has also changed the students’ roles during practical work and lab work. Traditional procedures during lab work involved recipes with predetermined outcomes but modern trends have seen students engage in authentic processes of science by technologically speeding up time and data collection automation. Students’ active role in these processes has been made easier because of those tools used to reduce classroom constraints and those of developmental barriers to such work. Technology has also improved collaboration for scientists, teachers and students and has improved information sharing among scholars (Halverson & Smith, 2009) as well as between institutions (Obuobi et al, 2006) Conclusion As has been demonstrated in the preceding section, the contributions of modern technology to learning and teaching science has been tremendous. While technologies continue to advance, it is expected that more contributions will be witnessed in the education sector. It will be important to assess these effects to determine whether these advancements actually mean that barriers to successful learning and teaching of science have been removed; this paper therefore proposes a research on this hypothesis. List of references Obuobi, D, Adrion WR, Watts K, 2006, Applying Information Technology to Improve Teaching and Learning in an African University, 36th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference M4C-26, San Diego, CA. Halverson, R & Smith A, 2009, How New Technologies Have (and Have Not) Changed Teaching and Learning in Schools, Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, Volume 26/ Number 2. Cavanaugh, S, 2002, Can virtual dissections replace the real thing? Paper presented at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA. Lefebvre, S, Deaudelin, D & Loiselle, J, 2006, ICT implementation stages of primary school teachers: The practices and conceptions of teaching and learning. Paper presented at the Autralian Association for Research in Education National Conference, Adelaide, Australia. Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 2003, Rural Students at Risk.: Introduction, retrieved 8th October 2013, from Gibson, JJ, 1977, The theory of affordances. In J. Bransford (Ed.), pp. 67-82. Wallace, RM, 2002, Teaching with the Internet: Curriculum making in a new medium, Manuscript submitted for publication. Rose, DH & Gravel, JW, 2010, Universal design for learning. In P. Peterson, E. Baker & B. McGraw (Eds.), International encyclopedia of education, pp. 119-124, Oxford, Elsevier. Collins, A & Halverson, R, 2009, Rethinking education in the age of technology: The digital revolution and the schools, Teachers College Press, New York. Bingimlas, KA, 2009, Barriers to the successful Integration of ICT in Teaching and Learning Environments: A Review of the Literature, Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science 7 technology Education, 5 (3), 235-245. Read More