The Next Generation will Compete Robots

The Transformation of Learning through Technology Integration

The fast booming of technology and many automated tasks in different working fields made the next years more challenging for our students. Many career opportunities that are obtainable nowadays, will disappear soon leaving behind more educated but jobless people, which will increase the unemployment crisis, unless we go for the right choices. The next generation career has much to do with technology, revolution, and computerization.

In conclusion, we need to prepare our students to do the jobs that computers cannot do and this requires us to immediately stop teaching them the way we do. A child who had born with tablets and I-pads in hands and has more to do with clicking and touching screens than flipping pages needs new approaches to learn and explore more than a paper and a pencil.

The paradigm shift in education by integrating technology, teaching our students to think critically, solve problem, and communicate are all important skills schools started to embed in instruction to raise the next generation for more challenging future.

The dilemma of “adding technology does not change the traditional teaching and learning, but makes poor pedagogy more expensive” should not be what we believe in as educators. The sad part of the story is when the overwhelmed majority of teachers employ the technology to sustain existing patterns of teaching rather than to innovate, however, they should use the new technology to accelerate students centered and project based learning.

Technology in education can best be seen as a platform or tool that can enable transformation of the teaching and learning activities among teachers, students, and resources in classrooms; when students engage in better activities, they can learn more.

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.

It helps students to monitor their own learning and responding to ample, useful feedback. Students become more responsible. Students take more control over their own learning. They learn how to make their own decisions and actually think for themselves.

 As our nation becomes increasingly more technology-dependent, it becomes even more necessary that to be successful citizens, students must learn to be tech-savvy.

The traditional passive learning mold is broken. With technology in the classroom the teacher becomes the encourager, adviser, and coach.

So what schools must we do?

·        Increase the use of technology by students and teachers

·        Improve the IT competencies by training teachers and familiarizing them with the new platforms of technology.

·        Provide the support staff and create a policy for technology to monitor the problems and the misuse of this approach.

·        Provided parents with training sessions to use the new technology efficiently.

·        Subscribe to a learning management system (LMS) that has all the tools needed to create engaging content, design lessons, and assess student understanding.

·        Enriched the high school electives with more ICT programs such as robotics, Design and Technology, Website Development, and Elctronic Design courses.

·         Provided technology intervention by using technology in daily class discussion, assessment, and instruction.

·        Communicate with both parents and students and provide feedback on the spot through LMS in addition to the school portal.

·        Use different educational Apps, and online resources such as IXL, Plickers, My-on, Mathletics, Edmodo, and Schoology.