Change is the only permanent thing in this world. Everything changes and nothing could be left constant. There has been a good amount of changes in the way learners learn and the teachers teach. Because of our ever-changing society, change has become more rapid.
Nowadays, it's not surprising to see growing children who seem to know more than their teachers. That is because today's generation has been raised in a society wherein the exchange of knowledge has become much easier and much quicker than before. And so, teachers have to be abreast on these matters so no one would be left behind.
Today's teachers even rely much on technology in preparing and developing their lessons and there's nothing bad about that because the thing is, you need to be more advance than your students in utilizing technology in teaching than them utilizing technology in learning although it's not true at times.
In my school, there has been a problem in content and the expected learning results that filling the gap between these two important aspects has been a very difficult problem I have faced. Because of the many programs that we offer at school, students tend to have loads of contents to learn in a shorter period of time and teachers have shorter time teaching all the areas in the content, thus, hurdling mastery in the subject matter. A huge class size has to be added into that.
Now, where technology should come in? I have observed that integrating technology in your classroom has increased that students' interest and also, it helps you, as a teacher, fill the gaps between contents, time and mastery. For instance, in my class, I am using a class portal blog to post online works and updates for my classes. I also post differentiated homeworks for a number of 50 students or more (you could not give differentiated homeworks for that class size without technology). That way I could ensure continuity in learning provided that our time in the classroom has never been enough. I also post websites for tutorials and more. What I usually do with our very short time for classroom interaction is follow-up their learning by providing some help for those who found difficulty and by giving feedback. However, presenting lessons and introducing and exploring concepts and short short development are still done face-to-face with the aid of technology sometimes.
What I like with the platform that I am using right now for our class portal blog is that I could check the stats of the pages. For example, I have 545 students who are expected to do online work, therefore there should also be 545 reads for a particular page where they are expected to do their work. In some cases, I only find 200 visits so therefore more than 300 did not do their works online. In short, they just copied from their classmates. I let them know about it and they're amazed. Just this afternoon, I gave differentiated homeworks to a class of 56 students and as I checked the stats of the page, their are 17 visits so far and a number of downloads for the homeworks. Therefore, I conclude that it's working!
And you? Have you been integrating technology into your classes? In what way? Please share them here... My post is so lengthy. Forgive me and so the grammar and spelling as this is unedited....
