Education has always been one of the reasons for humankind’s global success. Learning is the ability to make connections, to use one thing to predict another. Education has been the process to teach the way of seeing such connections. Traditionally, good teachers were the only way students could learn things efficiently. Today technology in education exists that make learning far more accessible and enjoyable. They make use of tested processes to stimulate the right areas of the minds of the students. All aspects of education, be it physical, vocational, or analytical can be made efficient by the use of education-related technologies. Today, artificial intelligence and machine learning handle tedious processes of educational institutions.
Technology, when strictly defined is a collection of techniques that are used in the production or achievement of an objective goal. Education and training in many areas inevitably deal with complicated processes that cannot be avoided. It helps the collection of fees, monitoring of student activity, and most administrative tasks of the educational institution. By using technology-driven techniques, these processes can not only be handled but can be made more efficient. The efficiency of the system, when increased, promotes teachers to have a more healthy relationship with students. It has been shown consistently that such a relationship is not only beneficial but also necessary for students to achieve a good learning experience.
Technology in Education
School technologies refer to various kinds of educational technology that can be installed or used in schools. These can be something small, like a whiteboard, to something big like an entire school management system. Whiteboards make it very easy to communicate essential abstract thoughts to students. Similarly, school management systems help run almost every part of the school autonomously. The school administration can focus more on students. Parents also are affected by these technologies, as they can easily track the growth of their child better than before. Following are certain themes they seem to carry, and how they carry out operations under such themes.
Fast-paced Learning using Technology in Education
The world’s occupations are on constant change, and with the advent of technologies in the industry sector, this change has been sped up. It is estimated that 65 per cent of students entering primary school in recent years will find themselves in occupations that do not exist today. This statistics is presented by the world economic research forum and shows just how fast the pace of the industrial world is. The educational system is required to keep up with this pace, or else it can actually harm the students in the education system. It is also important that learning is done solely based on curiosity while not strictly need to follow this rule can be greatly enhanced by technology in education.
Active Participation
The technologies present in today’s era encourage the active participation of students in the learning material. They use various methods from making sure classroom environments do not promote boredom to applying concepts of human psychology to achieve this. This can be done by various technologies, like augmented reality(AR) and Virtual reality(VR). These usually take advantage of the human sensory system and help long-term retention of information. AR is in the development stage of integration and only high-end medical students and practitioners use it on a consistent basis. VR is an educational technology that has been tested on various age groups and is incredibly popular in high-end universities.
Flexibility of Learning by using Technology in Education
Educational Technologies have greatly increased the flexibility of learning. Students today can learn in ways that were previously not possible because of such technologies. Audio and video integration has been of paramount importance in this regard. With this integration, remote learning has been possible. The students can easily study from home, in their own routines. This is useful when people cannot commute from remote areas or find such routines restrictive. In practice, flexible learning has been especially useful for higher education, as they tend to specialize in a specific area and traditional educational methods do very badly in such instances. Traditional education is limited by resources and learning methods, whereas modern methods get past these limitations through educational technology.
Faster and Effective Feedback
This is an issue in bigger educational institutions when the student body becomes too large to handle. The efficacy of teaching complicated educational material was checked by groups of teachers in the traditional education system. But it is no longer the case, as digital technologies with enough capacity can handle such tasks with ease. It has been estimated that a 92 per cent accuracy rate is the new normal in grading student tests by software-assisted methods. The feedback is also faster than the traditional method, which saves a lot of time. This technology becomes less effective on the higher education level, but it is advantageous nonetheless.
Student Database and Result Tracking
Technologies when correctly integrated into educational institutions helps in maintaining a student database. Growth tracking of every student is possible, because the software automatically has access to assignment results and the like, and connects it to each student in the database. The student database helps the administration and teachers maintain a good grip on how each student is doing. The technology also is made available to parents and guardians. It is often the case that parents are too busy in this era to handle. This increases the social utility of such technologies.
Taking Advantage of Epistemic Games
The students are encouraged in the present educational system to think innovatively by the use of epistemic games. Epistemic games are games that simulate adult environments but are fun and interesting to lay. They are designed around professions like engineering, management, urban planning, and journalism. Often, the games include various different skill sets to compete, and the students who go through epistemic games are guided by technology that helps enable them to get such skill sets. This happens largely unknown to the students, but these games are designed to be challenging yet fun to play. Epistemic games have only been introduced into educational institutions because of technologies that could be integrated into the schools in the present era.
Use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be integrated into various educational institutions to handle repetitive but non-mundane tasks. Artificial intelligence has been used to develop a profile of each student such that they can benefit from it. Chatbots became popular mostly because of this technology. Chatbots can help in many tasks, all the way from an online inquiry to working as a support service for every student. Many online learning applications use artificial intelligence to communicate with their users. This educational technology has not yet seen its full potential in the industry, but it is expected to reach a market value of 6 billion dollars by 2025.
Personalization of Education
Each student is different and has a different set of learning capabilities. Students also differ in their interests even if they study the same subjects in school. Therefore, it is important to focus on individual student needs when focusing on their education. This was almost impossible in the traditional education system, simply because there weren’t enough resources to do it. But with advances in technology, this has become possible. This is true in higher education, where students specialize in a particular domain. To deal with difficult problems it is important that everyone get an education that is highly personalized to their learning tendencies.
Lifelong Learning by using Technology in education
The nature of education has tilted towards pursuing knowledge for its own sake in today’s world. This is because no one is expected to keep a single job in a lifetime, and the value of curiosity has gone up. Lifelong learning involves learning about new things along the course of one’s life. Self-paced learning with effective feedback and retribution are some of the main things that have been possible because of educational technology. This not only helps create a better educational lifestyle but also improves the present learning material. This is because this type of learning is the one that drives research forward, and such research is required to acquire more innovation in the world.
As such, the future of education looks towards a faster but efficient way of learning more material than ever before. Since there is a skill shortage in the industry sector, education in the general sense will try to bridge the gaps between it. The education system will also evolve for those wanting to dwell on the subjects for their own sake. Technology in education will be incredibly beneficial to both the curious and the
Conclusion
As we have explored in the article, education has been and will be shaped by constant innovations. Technology will play a pivotal role in the way education is delivered to students of all ages. JibuSMS is one of the technologies driving millions of students in Kenya towards a faster and better education. JibuSMS is a fully autonomous school management system, that helps manage every aspect of a school remotely and effectively. It can handle enterprise-level tasks and can be integrated with Microsoft Azure IoT, which makes it a very powerful tool.
