With the passage of time modifications in mind set, attitudes and behaviors are inevitable to occur. The technological developments have immense impact on how people carry on different activities of life. The present era is the age of computer. Computer related technologies have made their way in all the domains of livelihood. Rapid development in internet technology has been continuously bringing changes in the ways we think and act. Internet has come with endless opportunities and resources for every single area of life. Education is not exempted from the list.
The use of technology in the field of education has the potential to bring sophistication and ease in numerous ways. The first thing that technology has made possible is the access to millions of books and text sitting at your home. There is no need to go far and wide in search of material on required topic. Technology has made it possible to get awareness about the recent developments on any subject matter quite quickly. Unlike the books, that need years to be updated, the content on internet keeps on being updated with new discoveries and fresh researches. In other words, technology has made it possible for us to attain the educational material that is up-to-date but not out-dated.
Moreover, the information on internet in much more cost effective. Even if you need to purchase a book or any other content, it is not as expensive as it would be in case of a physical entity. Further, there is no longer a need to have physical space for keeping the books, neither you have to carry weight with all the way long. Just a device and the whole library moves with you.
Sometimes it happens that we want to look for certain phrase or sentence in a document. The conventional methods of searching particular information in a pile of documents is time consuming and sometimes quite exhaustive. Technology has made the task a lot easier. You can locate the desired information within seconds only by going in search option and writing the required words. I remember during my school days, when smart phones were not that common, if some work was missed or we had to share some notes we had to get them photo copied. It was expensive. These days, because of mobile camera availability there is no need waste money on photocopying. Get the snapshots and let your work done. Also, there are software programs that aid data entry and apply complex statistics flawlessly on a data of millions of participants. Because of them a great deal of time is saved.
There are several other benefits of technology in education such as availability of interesting videos makes the learning fun. I didn’t have to teach my son ABC using traditional methods. He was a little above 2 years old when he had recognition of alphabets. He knew the phonetic and shapes of all. Everything, he had learnt by watching the videos.
Though there are several benefits of technology in education, yet the negative sides cannot be overlooked. Something that I experienced during lockdown was the downside of remote teaching. My son was a student of class 1 at that time. He used to take online classes which had a lack of proper interaction. I literally spent 7 to 8 hours a day dealing with his studies. Still he wasn’t making much progress. Things didn’t interest him. The fact is that when there is an environment designed for a particular purpose, the attention is focused. With remote learning, there is hardly any physical environment stimulating the senses related to learning. The case is not just with kids but zoom fatigue is a reality for adults as well. Moreover, technology brings a lot of distraction with it. Especial mobile phones are the greatest source of distraction. There are continuous pop up notification that make it difficult to stay focused and you end up wasting time.
Conclusively, I would say that technology has aided education in multiple ways. Nevertheless, technology should be merged with traditional teaching methods in order to make education the most effective.
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This is my participation for Hive Learner’s featured contest.
