WHY TECHNOLOGY IS YOUR FRIEND AS A TEACHER
According to Wikipedia, a teacher is a person who helps others to acquire knowledge, competences or values.
To be a good teacher, you need to create an interesting learning environment for your Students. Students should be provided with a safe, secure and comfortable environment in order to perform at their best.
Students experience many physical, intellectual, emotional and social changes in their early age, so they need to feel comfortable and safe to perform at their best in any learning environment.
A teacher plays an essential role in every student as educational life, behaviour and development. Though in the present competitive environment, it is a tough task for a teacher to manage a classroom by concentrating on every student. The most important thing a teacher needs to have is self-confidence. You have to believe in yourself to influence students in a great manner. The way you present yourself with confidence surely matters. Classroom management is the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly despite the disruptive behaviour of students and also classroom management involves a vast procedure from seating arrangements & taking attendance to personalized instructions. All of this can also be a relief for a teacher through the use technology.
Technology nowadays makes everything easy and effective. It helps teachers in managing their classroom very efficiently more reason why teachers should know technology is their friend and not a replacement for them. Let’s examine the important roles technology plays in helping a teacher and managing a classroom.
EDUFIRST NG
EDUFIRST.NG is an online portal which helps teachers and students collaborate effectively. It allows for ease of teaching and learning as teachers can allocate assignments to their students and include submission deadlines, whilst also providing answers to assignment questions. Teachers can also hold quizzes and multiple choice tests for students on key subjects.
Additionally, the Edufirst.Ng platform also offers relevant educational content to inspire and enlighten teachers and students on essential aspects of education and technology for improved student-teacher engagement and quality teaching-learning outcomes.
Students can also access scholarship information to further their studies abroad.
SMART TEACHER
Smart Teacher is an Android app which helps teachers plan their classes smartly. With Smart Teacher, a teacher can plan a curriculum for students, manage their report cards, assess their performance and design personalized instructions. Monitoring and marking of attendance are very easy with this tool, which saves a lot of time and effort of teachers. Teachers can also flip classrooms, as the app helps them record classes and uploading them on the server.
These are the few tools which help teachers in classroom management. As technology can make any task easy and effective, it does its best to help teachers and other educators. There are many such tools which help teachers to provide the best learning environment for their students.
IMPROVE DIGITAL LITERACY
In the world today, most children are exposed to technology from a very young age. Digital literacy is a fundamental skill for students in the 21st century. Knowing how to use technology and the internet will be required in almost every job that students might have in the future. By incorporating Educational Technology into the classroom, teachers can help students improve their digital literacy. When students get the feel of technology in the classroom, they automatically come alive and get more engaged.
Students love technology, and incorporating it into lessons gets them excited about learning. Teachers can make use of technology by adding it to existing lesson plans to boost their teaching, it will engage the students more without requiring teachers to do a lot of extra work.
PROVIDING SPACE FOR SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Teachers need to take these more importantly. Beyond academic content, there is an increasing recognition that students need a broader set of social and emotional skills to succeed in life, like metacognition, critical thinking, persistence, and self-regulation. But because teachers today have to spend so much time on content delivery, assessment, and classroom management, there isn’t much time to coach and guide students to build these critical skills.
Technology can help to address this in two ways. First, technology platforms themselves can encourage these skills, for example, a student might receive motivational messages while working through a difficult set of math word problems, encouraging persistence even as the student is struggling. Also as a teacher, if you notice any changes in your students you can advise them to see the school counselor or talk to their parents.
Secondly, technology can free up teacher’s time previously spent on administrative tasks, enabling teachers to spend more time working with students to build these crucial skills. Bonding with your students as a teacher goes a long way.
AUTOMATE GRADING
In the past years, teachers will spend hours after school and on weekends at home grading papers. Technology as made this stress free for teachers. There are tons of Educational Technology tools that can cut down on this time, automating grading and making measuring student progress simple. Online grading is also one of the benefits technology offers to teachers and parents. Online grading makes the work of a teacher easy.
Online grading also enhances effective student-teacher collaboration, as teachers can better engage students virtually and allow them to solve more problems independently. Online grading is also another way to encourage independent study, as students can leverage the schools online grading or computer-based test systems to take mock examinations as preparation towards periodic public examinations. It also makes it possible for parents to be abreast of the wards academic performance in school.
BRING YOUR CLASSROOM INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
Teachers are responsible for preparing students for a 21st-century world, and exposing them to technology is a part of that. It just makes sense to incorporate more Educational Technology into the classroom it makes teaching and learning better. With this age of technology, students who are below grade-level can use EdTech tools to get caught up. Educational Information is readily available online, and it is more up-to-date than with old print books, so parents and schools no longer have to spend on textbooks thanks to the internet. Also, teachers do not have to pay for workbooks anymore. There are tons of free materials online that can help teachers with lesson plans in minutes. EdTech can make learning more fun. There are tons of educational games and apps that get students excited and turn to learn into a game instead of a chore.
In conclusion, students are the most important part of any classroom and if parents were given the choice between a great teacher and the world’s most advanced educational technology, they will definitely pick the teacher any day for their children. Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between teachers and technology. Technology is best used when it empowers teachers and students to create personalized, resource-oriented, interesting and creative learning experiences. We just have to be careful to view it as a means to this end, rather than an end unto itself because they actually complement each other.
Edufirst is an educational technology platform that provides educational resource for students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders.
You can also visit our social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, twitter @edufirstNg
Article written by Titilayo Adewunmi
(Content developer at Edufirst.ng)