Teaching with technology

The introduction and future of the school class room as an e-learning centre will open up the four walls of the room to the sphere of the world where there are few boundaries and information and opportunities become endless. For many years already, e-learning has been used in the business world and as we become a global community schools will also have to move in this direction and e-learning opens the door to this opportunity. The first and main positive of  ‘learning through the use of technology [is that it] employs different modes of delivery and can cater for thousands of students in geographically different locations, learning at different times, while allowing for inexpensive and on-going updating of content.’(Jones, ICT, p1)   Community development is ensuring that all new housing estates throughout Australia are built not only with telephone lines, power and the like, but also with the cabling needed for this type of computer use. ‘At school and home, e-learning will be a fact of life for these students, supplementing rather than replacing traditional schooling and life long learning as currently practiced’ (Jones, ICT, p2)  The positives in the opportunity for learning to be done collaboratively whilst not in the confines of the classroom are huge.  

Teachers in this futuristic e-learning classroom will be faced with the real opportunity and the necessary equipment and software to guide, develop and assess the students in far greater detail and hence this will enable the teacher to place the students on individual learning pathways which will be most effective in developing their personal needs. One teacher quoted that this type of set-up would allow her ‘to have a whole series of tests that the students could do that enabled them to be profiled in terms of their learning styles, their interests and whatever, and, of course, their preferred learning styles.’  Whenever innovation is behind a change there are political and economic restraints but with e-learning there really are very few and the economical advantages are superior to any possible negatives. I point here to the opportunity for all schools no matter what the economic restraints being able to access the same information and opportunities and not just financially well off ones. In The Age newspaper when talking about the use of blogs in her classroom a  Ms McLeay  noted that “I had one girl’s mum who was so thrilled because teachers from around the world had commented so favourably about her daughter’s writing,” ( The Age, April 17, 2006) this is from the current, imagine the future.

-Cameron McCormack

References:

Anthony J. Jones, ‘ICT and Future Teachers: Are We Preparing For E-learning?’ Department of Science and Mathematics Education, The University of Melbourne