Chapter 7 Planning and Developing Technology Rich Instruction

Planning and Developing Technology Rich Instruction

    As we approach the 21st century, several new, more powerful technologies are just beginning to make their way into classrooms across the nation. For example, new personal computers support "multimedia" educational software that employs both sound and video to teach students facts and concepts. Advances in telecommunications technologies have spurred access to the Internet, allowing students and teachers to communicate with people from around the world via electronic mail, or "e-mail" as it is commonly known. New ways of obtaining and presenting information have given students powerful new ways of analyzing and understanding the world around them.

In fact, not only are new technologies more powerful, but they are easier to use and more accessible. Modified keyboards, joysticks, and head pointers allow students with physical disabilities to use computers.  Synthesized speech lets those with speech impairments "talk" by typing their words into a computer. And speech-to text translators transfer the spoken word into written text, facilitating communication for those who cannot type, or choose not to. Through the use of advanced computing and telecommunications technology, learning can also be qualitatively different. The process of learning in the classroom can become significantly richer as students have access to new and different types of information, can manipulate it on the computer through graphic displays or controlled experiments in ways never before possible, and can communicate their results and conclusions in a variety of media to their teacher, students in the next classroom, or students around the world. For example, using technology, students can collect and graph real-time weather, environmental, and population data from their community, use that data to create color maps and graphs, and then compare these maps to others created by students in other communities.   Similarly, instead of reading about the human circulatory system and seeing textbook pictures depicting bloodflow, students can use technology to see blood moving through veins and arteries, watch the process of oxygen entering the bloodstream, and experiment to understand the effects of increased pulse or cholesterol-filled arteries on blood flow.