Discuss the Integration of Technology in Education: Roadmap (Essay Sample)

Name
Institution
Subject
Date
Technology and Education
Introduction
Technology is a major step ahead in making easier the activities we engage ourselves in from day to day. Technology ensures that, as human beings, we are more efficient and fast in doing these activities. It achieves this by facilitating the analysis of information, problem solving and communication. Technological investments have become a priority for most governments for most sectors of their economies. Investment in technology for educational institutions has increased over the years. But then, how is technology related to education in particular. To find out this, we need to look at the various ways that technology has been integrated into education and its impacts in the education sector all over the world. We need to know how technology has been received by most of the actors within the education sector. This study projects the understanding on how technology is being adopted in the education sector and show the evident depictions on its conceptualization by teachers.
Roadmap
Unlike most industries that have realized an improvement in business activities, the education sector has not realized greater benefits from the use of modern technology in the educational institutions. This can be attributed to the fact that in most educational institutions most education-related activities are still based on grades, standards of the education and measures of outcome. Very few institutions as at now are efficient in their operations hence few institutions have enhanced their learning outcomes. Ironically, technology may have led to an increase in the costs of operating these educational institutions in various ways. For example, apart from a number of resources pumped into setting up the technology, there is a need for constant maintenance and update of both the technology’s software and hardware. At the rate at which technology changes, it means that these institutions are forced to buy new hardware from time to time in order to experience the same level of a given technology access.
Additionally, these institutions are under constant pressure from policymakers, the media and the public at large to implement the use of technology in the teaching and learning processes. This pressure is normally huge, and it demands greater investment in technology in a bid to better the students’ learning outcomes. This is because such investments are financed by taxpayers’ money and thus the policy makers should ensure good returns from the technology. From such pressure, policies are now based on evidence, and this has led to some positive outcomes. Some recent studies have shown an improvement in school achievements at fundamental stages that are statistically linked to the use of better technology (Harrison et.al, 2004). The British Educational and Communications Technology agency were in agreement with these findings. The agency further outlined the lack of technology in schools as one of the major factors that may affect school performance (Becta, 2007).
As a result of more positive and less negative effects of technology on education, some policymakers have tried to come up with a universal way of determining the returns of investing in technology. This is coupled with the pressure that comes with globalization. However, the universal benchmarking of school achievements has so far proved almost impossible because of the numerous differences between education systems. The educational institutions are also under some pressure to ensure that student does not use technology in the wrong way. This is because technology only facilitates the acquisition, processing, and storage of all sorts of information but the actual sorting of this information should be monitored by the educational institutions. Failure to do so may see the institutions embattled in legal, ethical and sometimes ideological battles regarding the use of some information or the misuse of the same.
In order to address some harmful and risky effects of technology, some institutions have resulted to limiting access to some websites for the students as well as disabling some kinds of online activities e.g. synchronous communication. Some other harmful effects of technology that need to be addressed by the institution include hacking and cyber bullying among others.
In the long run, this pressure and increase in the cost of operations for the institutions will affect the teaching and learning processes. There are so many aspects projected to be in place to ensure the whole process is a success. Changes within the school and the school technological policies have to be made. For example, re-engineering the whole learning setup and revising the standards of learning for the institution. Technology itself is often viewed as an agent of change which can be of great use when it comes to changing the learning environment, the modes of teaching and the learning methods. This has a significant impact on the whole educational institution.
For example, a new technology project often requires the installation of new facilities, modification of existing policies or establishment of new policies and regulations, relocation of resources, changes in the informal and formal activities, and may also affect the social relationships of different groups of people. In this way, technology innovations introduced to schools are essentially invaders from outside. Whether they can be successfully adopted and become permanently established depends on their compatibility with the teaching and learning the environment and the co-adaptation between the technology and the school as an ecological system (Zhao & Frank, 2003).
If the school system, for example, would be viewed as an ecosystem which has got many parts within it. These parts of it and the way they relate to each other directly affect the growth of new parts within the system. In a more complex socio-cultural environment of this same school, different groups and processes are inter-linked with each other very closely both inside and outside the school to create a web of changes. In the same way, these groups and processes affect the students’ learning process. The same changes caused by these parts’ interactions also affect the institution’s operation. This, therefore, means that the way the actors within the institution and those outside it will interact and affect the integration of technology in the education system (Zhao & Frank, 2003).
There are evident gaps between trends in technology and the use of technology in the education sector. These gaps are brought about by various reasons ranging from the institution’s technology resources and its culture, the willingness and exposure of the teachers and students with regards to the use of technology. The social interaction dynamics in the educational institution’s system is also a factor.
An implementation plan may work for a certain technology at one time, and it may not work at another. This calls for a dynamic plan which reflects changes. This will definitely work better compared to a static plan (Tondeur, Van Keer, van Braak, & Valcke, 2008). It is good to note that new policies need to be formulated for a project that has been regarded as successful to remain so. There is a need for extra resources should be injected into increasing and improving the technical support, upgrading the technology’s software and buying new hardware to ensure the technology remains a success. The teachers are supposed to have granted to the necessary help just like the students need it. For all these to be realized, there is a need for a constant technology planning and evaluation, strong leadership in place, provision of adequate and prompt support as well as refining and revising the practices in place from time to time (Tondeur, Van Keer, Van Braak, & Valcke, 2008).
It may still prove to be difficult, with all these factors in place, to judge whether implementation of technology in the educational institution is a success because there are yet no models or set goals to follow. For the teachers and the institutional heads, there is also the challenge of determining the effectiveness of technology’s use within an institution (Russell, Bebell, O’Dwyer & O’Connor, 2003). This has seen most policy makers looking at the amount of time the students spend using technology and the types of technology in a given institution as a marker of successful technology implementation instead of measuring how the technology is used in a meaningful way to aid the teaching and learning within the institution, as well as whether that really happens.
There is a need for a universally acceptable or widely accepted basis for determining an effective form of teaching. Some studies use the students’ academic performance as the indicator of an effective method of teaching. Some scholars argue that this form of measuring the effectiveness of teaching only serves to support an education system that is full of social and intellectual inequalities. An effective teaching method is just one of many factors that may lead to a student’s good academic performance (Campbell, Kyriakides, Muijs, & Robinson, 2004). Campbell et al. realized there were some problems that are synonymous with the concepts of the effectiveness of teaching. First is the conceptualization of the effectiveness of a teacher or teaching aid. Second, the correlation between the educational institution and teaching effectiveness. They argued that teachers can be more effective in enabling environments and may be ineffective in less conducive learning environments. Teachers in a conducive environment are more likely to try new ways of teaching. The third problem is that of the inadequate teaching effectiveness research. The re...