Teaching with Technology

In a review of literature, the U.S. Department of Education (2014) identified the following benefits for using technology in instruction:

• "Effective learning environments elicit students’ intuitive ideas and related experiences while providing new experiences that cause them to question those ideas, helping them to understand that there may be common situations they aren’t yet able to explain. This can set the stage for students to use new knowledge to reorganize and modify their existing ideas, creating increasingly productive mental models.

• "Technology can support this process by asking students to reason about many different situations and using each student’s responses to diagnose the set of ideas that a student holds. Technology can then provide students with counterexamples and contrasting arguments for naive ideas that do not correspond to experts’ understanding of the concept.

• "In addition to providing tailored examples or hints, technology-based learning systems can support the personalization of the student learning experience by analyzing students’ performance on recent tasks and suggesting learning activities, resources, or approaches matched to each student’s profile of skills and competencies. Appropriately executed, this tailoring process has been shown to lead to increases in student learning.

• "In addition to adapting instruction to the particular academic progress of each student, technology can also support differing student capacities, opening learning opportunities to students with disabilities and others who have traditionally been excluded. For example, technology is particularly adept at providing the range of representations, means of engagement, and opportunities for expression that are essential to universal designs for learning, enabling designs that are more flexible and effective for all students."

Peru State College has instructional technology resources available to faculty to use both in an online environment and also in the classroom. Learn more about these technologies on this page.

Peru State Resources

• Technology Applications Available to Faculty

• BlackBoard Training Material

 

Additional Examples of Instructional Technologies

• Expanding Learning Experiences with Virtual Guest Experts (Parrish, 2017)

• 10 Tips for Creating Effective Instructional Videos (Smedshammer, 2017)

• Free ‘Clickers’ for All: Using Google Forms to Survey Your Student (LaGier, 2016)

• I’m in ‘Kahoots’ with Technology in the Classroom (Sachar, 2017)

 

For Further Reading

• Next Steps for the NGDLE (O'Brien, 2017)
  Whether the next steps are evolutionary or revolutionary is up for grabs — as is the question of whether the charge should be led by vendors, IT pundits, CIOs, faculty, or students. Most likely, as in so many other areas of higher education, the development of the next generation of digital learning environments will require contributions from all of the above.