Taking Advantage of Educational Technology
By: Hubert Fernandes

Category: Business » Education and Learning
Article Views: [246] (Old Stats: 252)

Organized teaching institutions have been around for thousands of years. Experienced teachers have passed down their knowledge with each generation improving upon the prior.

Child psychology has advanced light years just in the last several decades. The World Wide Web has made the sharing of knowledge incredibly easy. All of this has come together to allow modern scholars to develop the most advanced and effective educational tools today’s teachers have ever had access to.

Modern education tools are the direct result of educational technology.

Educational technology

Educational technology is the study of education. More specifically learning technologies, or technologies that assist in the learning process.

“Old school” educational technology includes behaviorism. Think Pavlov’s dog (Dr. Ivan Pavlov “taught” dogs that ringing a bell indicated that food was about to be served). Behaviorism has fallen out of favor as modern psychology has improved. While behaviorism works well for dogs and cats, humans are a bit more sophisticated.

Cognitivism, the mechanisms by which people learn, underwent a revolution of sorts during the 70’s. This resulted in a great deal of change for learning theory. Cognitive learning theory looks beyond just simple behavior to study how that behavior is learned.

The educational technology of constructivism teaches that a student is his own best teacher. A student’s learning is self guided through observation and collaboration with others of similar abilities and experiences. The World Wide Web gave constructivism a huge boost as it greatly improved the ability to collaborate with others.

What it all means

Behaviorism still has its place. What educational technology has done is better explain where that place is. Today’s educational technology gives instructors the tools they need to precisely target their student’s needs. As a society striving not just to learn, but to be better at teaching, we have never been more enlightened as to how our children learn and are now being given the technology needed to provide them with the best possible education.