The research essay examines the advantages and disadvantages of integrating technology into the curriculum. An emphasis is placed on 21st-century skills and the importance given to ensuring that students are well aware of cooperative learning, sharing ideas, and opinions, thus integrating collaborative projects, where everyone is involved. Understanding how to make provisions for students in the classroom and ensuring this is addressed within curriculums. Teachers should have the correct tools to ensure they are able to implement technology within their curriculums for both Primary and Secondary.
Abstract
The following research essay will examine the advantages and disadvantages of integrating technology into the curriculum A emphasis is placed on 21st-century skills and the importance given ensuring students are well aware of cooperative learning, sharing ideas, and opinions, thus integrating collaborative projects, where everyone is involved. Understanding how to make provisions for students in the classroom and ensuring this is addressed within curriculums are imperative. Ensuring teachers have the correct tools to ensure they are able to implement technology within their curriculums for both Primary and Secondary, will promote teachers to support students with different educational needs.
Keywords:Curriculum, Education, International Baccalaureate Programme, Technology
Introduction
As teachers, we always fear the phenomenon of using technology in the classrooms.
Most teachers with years of experience would have had a different set of training when attending Teachers Training Colleges or even Universities. In the Modern 21stCentury technology is the key aspect of teaching resources it is used for various reasons to enhance your lesson. In most International Schools it is a basic requirement to have ICT experience as most assessment programs and tracking involves software including Moodle and Managebac. This essay will discuss three advantages and disadvantages of using technology in the curriculum and classroom.
The first advantage of using and integrating technology into the curriculum
Any school that considers integrating technology into its curriculum is extremely progressive. It is an effective tool to allow students to research, explore, and internalise information available on the internet. For example, in a music class, the students will employ research skills where they have to utilize their communication skills as part of the Approaches to Teaching and Learning (ATL). In a school setting within a curriculum, it is important to allow opportunities for the students to execute critical thinking. Education Reform (2013) defined critical thinking as
Critical thinking is a term used by educators to describe forms of learning, thought, and analysis that goes beyond the memorization and recall of information and facts. In common usage, critical thinking is an umbrella term that may be applied to many different forms of learning acquisition or a wide variety of thought processes. In its most basic expression, critical thinking occurs when students are analyzing, evaluating, interpreting, or synthesizing information and applying creative thought to form an argument, solve a problem, or reach a conclusion" (paragraph 1).
Second Advantage of integrating technology into your curriculum
Students who are exposed to technology through a curriculum can enhance their literacy skills through students will access to various reading programs demonstrating their understanding of the English language through means of using technology. Reading assignments could be placed on iPads where which inevitably applies to differentiation in the classroom. To support the students on the EAL register the teacher could give them keywords to research, they in return could explain it in their words by writing sentences using these words in the correct context. Andrews (2013) suggested that:
Allowing the children to work in this manner shifted the learning from teacher-centred to child-centred. Children could work at their own pace without having to wait for further instructions from the teacher. They could tackle problems themselves by rewinding the videos and reading additional written instructions, and seeing what equipment was needed for the next chapter in the ebook (paragraph 3).
An essential benefit of allowing technology into a curriculum promotes a child-centred manner. There are several benefits gained from integrating technology into the classroom to allow a child to develop different skills and attributes which will enable him/her to become confident lifelong learners through using the various programs, especially Google Suite, including docs, slides, sheets and forms.
A third advantage of allowing technology into the curriculum
There are many benefits of integrating technology into your classroom. In music for example you allow students to be creative through composing music using Garageband. The added benefit of having audiovisuals available for students to recap and internalize what they have learned in music is a massive benefit. Now students have the opportunity to use their telephones and access Bandlab online, which has become this new educational tool to help teachers breach the gap by keeping students engaged, motivated and encouraged to express themselves through music, which promotes the ideology of the IB curriculum, where students are “risk-takers” as suggested by IBO (n.d., 2018).
Andrews (2012) confirmed that:
The in-built AV tools mean that the iPad has endless possibilities to be used creatively in any subject in the school curriculum, it just needs imagination. For example, there are apps for drawing, editing photos, creating movies, ebooks, animations, and photo stories, composing music, writing graphical novels, and other useful creative apps. Besides, many of these apps have the option to publish work to larger audiences online, increasing the incentive for the children to produce quality pieces of work. The laptop doesn't have the same efficiency and ease of use that the iPad has and the touch interface just makes it more fun and interactive (paragraph 5).
The three disadvantages of using technology in the curriculum
Focusing on the three disadvantages of using technology in the curriculum would start with not every school having the necessary resources available for students to use technology in the curriculum due to lack of funding. Most governmental schools that function on rigid budget cuts are not able to provide enough technology for their teachers to use in the classroom. Using technology has added benefits for use in the classroom and curriculum. Andrews (2012) elaborated on the following three negatives of allowing to use of Ipads in the classroom:
- Adobe's Flash and Javascript - can be problematic for example when you have an interactive game for a starter, main or plenary activity some settings have to be changed for them to work, and students would have to allow those using settings on the ipads, through reloading the webpage they will have access to the whole game.
- Multitasking - once you use an apple Ipad you will not be able to open Windows programs or games designed.
- Word processing - a perfect example would be most students would use the notepad on the Ipad instead of MS-word, " The iPad is quite limited as a device that you would use regularly to word process on. I much prefer to type lengthy documents on my computer, where I can switch quickly between browser, word processing, and email. Despite this, I still use the iPad regularly for light writing such as emails and Twitter" (Andrews, 2012, paragraph 5).
The last disadvantage of using technology in the curriculum is that most teachers who qualified twenty years ago are not familiar with most programs. In International Schools, it is usually a prerequisite to understanding how to use Managebac as lesson planning, differentiation, and tasks are set using various interactive programs available to them. They must be willing to be trained to track students and complete assessments, which could either be formative or summative.
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- Citation du texte
- Dr. Mario Maxwell Müller (Auteur), 2022, Integrating technology into the curriculum. Advantages and disadvantages, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1244670
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