Introduction
The contemporary education environment has changed in response to the needs of the market. The skill requirements at present are different from those of earlier periods. The integration of technology in the classroom is in response to the significance of technology in the contemporary environment as well as the need to increase the effectiveness of the instruction process. Educational technology has many applications in the classroom. In addition to differentiating the instruction process, teachers can also use technology. This paper focuses on the use of education technology in the instruction and assessment of the students.
Section One: Mission and Vision Statements
Mission Statement
It is our mission to improve offer education that is relevant to the digital age through the incorporation of education technology into the instruction and assessment process.
Vision Statement
Our vision is to enhance academic achievement by improving the efficiency of the teachers and the students through the use of academic technology.
Section Two: Communications Plan
The educational community is comprised of various stakeholders. Communicating with all the stakeholders is necessary to ensure that mission and vision statements highlighted above are achieved. Additionally, effective communication is necessary to ensure a cohesive cooperation between all the stakeholders. The communication channel to be used to engage with the educational community is a class website. The class website is appropriate because it offers a platform through which various types of information can be hosted and accessed by the stakeholders. The choice of the website is based on its versatility. Emergency alerts can be disseminated through the website. Additionally, the teacher can disseminate information on public relations, special announcements, campaigns, important reminders, event promotions, and information on parent-teacher organization. Additionally, a website has a wide reach. It can also be configured to enable the restricted access for different groups of stakeholders to certain types of information. Additionally, the teacher can also disburse forms and documents through the class website.
The communication in the classroom will benefit significantly from the integration of technology. The class website will have a platform through which the teacher will update the grades of the students. Through the class website, the teacher will also communicate information on the dates for assessment, disseminate class notes, and also collect assignments that are to be submitted electronically. The class website will also have a platform through which the parent can track the performance of the student. Additionally, technology will enhance communication in the classroom by offering a platform through which the teacher can deliver the lectures. This aspect entails the differentiated instruction where the teacher will integrate the use of technological devices to aid the presentation of information during a lesson.
The use of technology for communication in the class, particularly the use of the class website is challenged by the threat of cyber insecurity (Stallings, 2013). This is a significant threat because the website contains sensitive information that the stakeholders might not it to be divulged to third parties. Various measures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of the websites. The stakeholders who access the website will be required to use passwords (Stallings, 2013). To ensure that the stakeholders use strong passwords, the website will require that the users use a minimum of eight characters for their websites. It will also be a requirement that the passwords contain a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers (Stallings, 2013).
The storage of passwords in the server will be done in the form of encrypted values. A hashing algorithm will be employed to ensure that the authentication process compares the password input on the user side with the hash values on the server side (Stallings, 2013). Considering that the students will upload files via the website, there is a potential threat that the files might contain scripts that could open the website when they are executed on the server end. The safeguards that will be implemented include the renaming of the file to make sure that the file extensions are correct. Additionally, the file permissions will be changed to ensure that files do not execute (Stallings, 2013).
Section Three: Integrating Instructional Technology
The integration of instructional technology has various advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is differentiated instruction. The use of technology allows the students to access instructional material that is at their level of progress. Most of the educational apps are intuitive and adaptive and increase the level of difficulty based on the performance of the student. Another advantage of integrating instructional technology is the different learning modalities that it offers to the students. This means that the students learn through different means. This offers other options in addition to the lecture environment.
It caters to the independent students who can learn independently of the teacher. By allowing the students options, students can experiment with different techniques and determine which strategies best serve their needs. The integration of instructional technology is advantageous in classes where students with special needs and learning disabilities are mainstreamed with the other students. This is because there is adaptive educational technology that allows the children with special needs to thrive in the normal classroom environment. Such technology includes programs that speak on the behalf of children who have difficulties with language.
The integration of instructional technology also has its disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of integrating instructional technology is that the technology allows the students access to the work of other students thereby perpetuating the problem of plagiarism. Through the educational technology, the students can gain access to information, tests, and reports that have been authored by other students.
The other disadvantage is the unequal opportunities in the access to the technology outside the classroom. Some students may not have the technological devices required to access the instructional materials outside the classroom. This would have the students at a disadvantage because they would have to wait until they are in the classroom to gain access to the material. The potential for distraction is also a disadvantage and the concern for teachers. The distraction is brought about by the possibility that the students will use the technological devices for other reasons that are not associated with learning. This could also happen when learning is in progress thereby distracting the students.
Despite the disadvantages, the integration of instructional technology into the classroom offers real benefits, especially in the current era where there is a proliferation of technology in all sectors. The benefits that the integration of instructional technology offers benefit the students with special needs and learning disabilities. This facilitates the mainstreaming of the students with learning disabilities in addition to benefiting the other students.
Some of the recurring terms when considering integrating instructional technology in a classroom are wired and wireless classrooms. Wired classrooms are different from wireless classrooms in that their access to the internet is facilitated using physical cables (Warner & Litowitz, 2008). The technological devices used in the classroom such as laptops are connected to the internet using data cables that are plugged into a central cable. Wireless classrooms are different in that the access to the internet is facilitated using wireless technological applications that negate the need for the use physical cables to access the internet (Warner & Litowitz, 2008). Arguably, the wireless technology is more preferably because it entrenches convenience in the use of the Internet by eliminating the use of the physical cables.
Section Four: Differentiating Instruction through Technology
The integration of instruction technology has the potential has the potential to differentiate the instruction in the classroom as was discussed in the previous section as an advantage. There are several advantages to differentiating instruction using technology. Using technology to differentiate instruction benefits the students with the learning disabilities. This is because technology offers various modifications that can be used to enhance their learning. For instance, visual aids can be used for students with hearing difficulties. The learning material can be offered in the form of slides. The use of technology also enables the enlargement of the font to enable students with poor vision to see the lecture material.
The use of technology to differentiate instruction also benefits the other students by offering them appropriate challenges. This is because the use of classroom technology can enable the teachers to tailor the content area, the skills required, and the focus on certain competencies to enable the students who excel in class the challenge themselves. The teachers can also incorporate period assessment into the instructions to determine the rate at which the students grasp the concepts being taught.
One of the disadvantages of using technology to differentiate instruction is that all the students may not be conversant with the technological devices used. This will require the teacher to spend more time helping the students gain some competence in the use of the technological devices. This could delay the pace for the other students as they spend more time without the full attention of the teacher. Additionally, it also delays learning for the students who are not conversant with the applications of the technological devices. This is because they spend significant of the class time learning how to use the devices rather than learning the concepts of the subject being taught.
There are other uses of technology in the classroom other than the differentiation of instructions. The teacher can also use technology in the assessment of learning (Lim, Zhao, Tondeur, Chai & Tsai, 2013). The teacher can incorporate learning assessments into the instructions. This can be done periodically to determine whether the students comprehended the concepts that were being taught.
The use of technology to differentiate instruction is evidence-based. Studies have shown that this approach improves the performance of the students. A cross-sectional study performed by Gulek & Demirtas (2005) to determine the effect of the use of laptops on the students showed a marked improvement in the achievement of the students after the program was implemented. The baseline data acquired before the implementation of the program showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the performance of the students who used laptops and those who did not use laptops. The variables that were measured included English language arts, writing, mathematics and overall grade point average. However, the researchers found that a year after the implementation of the program, the students who used laptops performed better in almost all the measures above (Gulek & Demirtas, 2005).
Incorporating student-centered technology in a classroom is important to the learning process and the academic achievement of the student. The student-centered technology enables the students to participate in the learning process by collaborating with one another (An & Reigeluth, 2011). The student-centered technology encourages and challenges the students to develop problem-solving and analytical skills (Neo & Kian, 2003). The student-centered technology also inspires creativity and innovativeness in the students. Student-centered technology also changes the role of the teacher and transforms him from a dictator to a facilitator and a consultant (An & Reigeluth, 2011).
Section Five: Technology to Support Assessment
Technology is not just used to differentiate instruction in the classroom. Technology can facilitate the continuous assessment of the students. On a general level, technology facilitates assessment of the students by enabling the students to submit their work to the teachers. Additionally, the instructors can give feedback to the students in real time. However, there are more specific ways to which the technology can be used to facilitate the assessment of students. One of the ways is the use of ePortfolios where the students collect their work on a web-based platform to demonstrate learning and achievement. The teachers can also use clickers or student response systems. In this tool, the teacher poses a question or a set of questions. The students input their responses which are then aggregated and displayed using different presentation styles in front of the classroom. Alternatively, teachers can use Blackboard tests where quizzes are posted for students to respond online (Buzzetto-More & Alade, 2006).
The use of technology in the assessment of the students has merits and demerits. One of the advantages is that the teachers can give immediate feedback to the students. For instance, the answers that are given via the clickers platform are tallied and displayed in the classroom immediately. Another advantage is that the formative assessment of the students, especially during the lessons is convenient and easy compared to the use of quizzes on examination papers. However, the teacher may not ascertain the originality of the work, especially when the assessment tests are given to the students as home work. This is a disadvantage because the teachers may be grading someone else’s work.
Although the advantages highlighted above, underscore the benefits that the use of technology in the assessment of students proffers to both the teachers and the students, the disadvantages raised also caution against the reliance on technology only in the assessment of the learners. Teachers should find a healthy mixture of technology and other approaches to assessment to ensure that they have an accurate account of the abilities of the student. The use of different approaches to assessment compensates for the shortcomings in some of the approaches (Bennett & Scholes, 2001).
The use of technology to facilitate the assessment of the students is important as it complies with the ISTE standards that aim to transform the environment in which education is offered through the use of innovative and creative approaches to teaching in the digital age (Bennett & Scholes, 2001). The use of technology to facilitate assessment underscores the use of contemporary tools to improve the learning environment and process (Bennett & Scholes, 2001).
Reflection and Conclusion
The academic achievement of the student is a product of the effort of the teacher and that of the student. The teachers guide the students in learning the concepts that are contained in the curriculum for their grade. The incorporation of technology in the classroom is a move that received scholarly attention. The paper focused on the use of technology in the instruction and assessment process. The use of the technology in the instruction process not only helps increase the productivity of the students but also that of the teacher. The discussion above has shown that the use of technology to differentiate instruction offers the student with diverse ways of learning. It also encourages the students to develop knowledge rather than relying on the teachers.
The discussion has also shown that the differentiation of instruction using technology offers various modifications that are appropriate for students with disabilities. For instance, the presentation of lecture material through audiovisual means allows students with vision difficulties to increase the font. When the lecture material is presented in an audiovisual medium, students with visual difficulties can listen to the audio recordings and keep pace with the other students.
The use of technology to facilitate assessment is another aspect that the paper has covered. The use of technology to facilitate assessment offers convenience to the teachers. This is especially the case during the formative assessment. The paper has shown that the teacher can use different technological tools to determine whether the students have understood the concepts. For instance, Clickers was highlighted as a tool that teachers can use to give quick tests during the lesson to determine the weaknesses of the students and the areas where more focus is required. Additionally, the use of technology to facilitate assessment enables the teacher to give the students immediate feedback on their work. The students can then use the feedback for revision.
These elements make the work of the teacher easier. The teacher can get more work done within the same amount of time when instruction and assessment are facilitated using technology. This contributes to increasing their productivity. Empirical studies discussed in the paper have shown that the integration of technology in the classroom during instruction has a positive effect on the academic achievement of the students as determined by the analysis of various variables and comparing them with a control group that did not use technology.
References
An, Y. and Reigeluth, C. (2011).Creating Technology-Enhanced, Learner-Centered Classrooms: K–12 Teachers’ Beliefs, Perceptions, Barriers, and Support Needs. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education. 28(2): 54-62.
Bennett, L., & Scholes, R. (2001). Goals and attitudes related to technology use in a Social Studies method course. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial] , 1 (3)
Buzzetto-More, N. and Alade, A. (2006). Best practices in e-assessment. Journal of Information Technology Education, 5(5): 251-269.
Gulek, J. and Demirtas, H. (2005). Learning With Technology: The Impact of Laptop Use on Student Achievement. The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 3(2): 1-39.
Lim, C.-P., Zhao, Y., Tondeur, J., Chai, C.-S., & Tsai, C.-C. (2013). Bridging the Gap: Technology Trends and Use of Technology in Schools. Educational Technology & Society, 16 (2): 59–68.
Neo, M. and Kian, K. (2003). Developing a Student-Centered Learning Environment in The Malaysian Classroom – A Multimedia Learning Experience. The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 2(1): 13-21.
Stallings, W. (2013). Cryptography and network security. Harlow: Pearson Education.
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Warner, S., & Litowitz, L. (2008). Technology Education: A Contemporary Perspective. Phi Delta Kappa, 89(7), 519-521
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