Technology Improves Education :: Educating Technological Papers

Technology Improves Education Many believe a revolution is taking place in education in the way people learn and they way instruction is given. The education community has been hearing of reforms and revolutions for the past few decades, but most of them have been nonexistent or without any long-term merit or real value. Some believe the method of an instructor lecturing while students listen and absorb is really the only viable way to teach or learn. About two decades ago, when personal computers started to become affordable, many thought that computers would revolutionize education, that computer-based teaching and learning would become the savior of education and the solution to falling test scores. This has never really happened. Over the past two decades, many teachers have successfully prepared students, some with computers in the classroom and some without. Teachers could avoid computers, either because they chose not to learn how to use them or because they had none in their classroom or school to use. T eachers entering the profession have not been required to understand computational technology in order to graduate from college. The internet has been in existence for almost two decades and began to extend into schools about 15 years ago, first into universities and then into K-12. Did the internet revolutionize education? Not exactly, it did provide an opportunity to expand learning options for teachers and students who were fortunate enough to have internet access, a few computers, and appropriate guidance on usage. Often this took place in only one classroom and only one school within a system and did not become systemic throughout the school. There are many factors affecting this slow implementation of computing and communications technology in schools, including administrations with no knowledge of its value or no willingness to realign school budgets to include computational technology; insufficient in service professions development programs for teachers; a lack of specific curriculum benefits or of resources for teachers to use in their courses; deficient preservice preparation of teachers in technolo gy or computation. Why do some of us believe there is now a revolution taking place that cannot be ignored by educators or administrators? In November 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser for all three computing platforms (UNIX, PC, and Macintosh). The internet had become the World Wide Web, and now Mosaic allowed anyone who knew the basics about using a computer and a mouse to go out onto the Web and easily and quickly locate multimedia information.