Technology Worth Including in Classroom Education

The following video gives a brief discussion on New Media Literacies and what skills students will need in order to be competitive in modern society. The video encourages us to be users and creators of media and to think critically about the media we encounter in our everyday lives. These are all very good teaching points for any instructor to consider.

But what specific tools do students need to know how to use? The video describes a lot of skills that consumers of New Media need to have (judgement when deciding what online resources are trustworthy, understanding of the different social skills needed when communicating in different contexts, etc), and they are all important abilities that students need to develop. So what specific tools are useful for helping students share their creativity, interact with other social groups, conduct research, and perform other tasks that are relevant for education (collection, creation, and distribution of knowledge)? Well let’s see what technology can be used to push the ideas of RCPCI (Research, Collaboration, Publication, Communication, and Innovation). *Please note that this discussion is just a starting point. There are so many other resources available out there.

Research

Figure 1: The Computer Lab
Original image found here

Developing library search skills is a great place to start if you need to conduct research while working on a project in any field of study. If you’re a Georgia State University student, you can go to the library website and access articles through Galileo.

You can find many other databases online for scholarly articles. JSTOR is one great place for finding articles from academic publications.

Students can even begin to conduct their own research online by setting up polls and surveys. Polldaddy is one site that allows anyone to conduct research easily online.

Collaboration

Technology can be used for collaboration when people use a program that allows multiple users to set up individual accounts but still share the same workspace simultaneously or make edits one at a time. A wiki would be one example of this. There is also PBWorks, which is similar to a blog and file storage system, but it’s meant for group activities.

Collaboration can also just occur when individuals just have somewhere to post their ideas even without sharing a workspace. A forum or email system, like Hotmail, is somewhere that brainstorming can occur, but each participant will just have to read through and keep track of what is said in every post. It’s probably not as effective as a wiki, but it’s still possible.

People can have video conferences online if they use Skype.

Publication

A blog is a very easy way to present text and graphic based information online. Blogs can also embed or link to audio and video files. Blogs.com is one place where anyone can set up a free blog.

For sharing videos, YouTube is the leader and most heavily used resource available. An educational variant of YouTube would be TeacherTube, which is more appropriate for finding and posting educational videos.

Communication

New media technology is all about sharing ideas and encouraging a dialogue, so satisfying a need to communicate is at the heart of all the technology that is being discussed in this post.

Innovation

Being innovative can mean that someone is creating something that has not been around before (in which case the creator would be either building a piece of technology from scratch or using some form of New Media to simply publish information about their innovation) or it can mean that someone is using an established technology in a way that is unique. If someone is going to post something new to the World Wide Web that hasn’t been seen before, then that person would simply need some web space to host their product. Anyone can sign up for free web space through a site like AwardSpace.

Disclaimer: I’ve never used AwardsSpace, Skype, or Polldaddy, so you’ll have to let me know if they’re not up to par.

 

The Future of Technology in the Classroom

Figure 2: Student Machines
Original images found here and here

So where do you see technology taking education in the future? This is a long topic in itself, so maybe there will be a post on this in the future. For now, I will say that it seems likely that we will see more and more integration of media types into one source. For instance, we will not have to go to one site for video conferencing and another for collaboratively composing music. It seems like we will see more sites consolidating different capabilities or just trying to make their existing functionality easier to control.