Classroom management and innovation in education career exploration

ePortfolio

Criterion 2: Innovations in Education

The pace of technological growth and innovation in the Internet Age has easily outstripped any other period in human development, leading to profound and seemingly permanent changes in the way information is created and communicated in the matter of a few short years. The impact that these innovations and the pace of change has had on the business world and on everyday interactions has been well documented and is clearly self-evident in many cases, yet the manner in which many specific new technologies as well as technology in general can and has impacted instruction and education remains less apparent and thus less practically useful. There are many ways that technologies including social networking websites, graphics displays, and a variety of other software, hardware, and information-sharing components can lead to more effective and more authentic learning experiences; specific methods for deriving this utility from current technologies will be explored below.

Social Networking: Collaboration and Motivation

Social networking tools are often seen as providing a distraction form educational activities and goals, but there is no reason that these tools cannot be utilized by educators towards positive educational goals. In fact, the degree to which students are distracted and/or occupied by social networking sites and activities is possibly an indicator of the level of usefulness they present towards such ends. As long as sites like Facebook and MySpace are recognized for how they are actually utilized by learners, they can provide utility to educators as well.

Research already shows that adolescents and emerging adults use social networking websites in a way that specifically and even consciously strengthens certain aspects of their offline social networks and activities (Subrahmanyam et al. 2008). This same research suggests that specific online contexts are created and utilized in response to specific offline areas of life, meaning that learners are already automatically differentiating (to some degree) the way that friends, family members, and employers or other "official" individuals are interacted with (Subrahmanyam et al. 2008). Educators can utilize this knowledge to create online communicative bonds with students that reinforce classroom relationships without creating privacy issues or resulting in a counterproductive sense of intrusion. Online networks can also be utilized to facilitate peer-to-peer study groups and discussion boards, making students better at seeking answers and developing critical responses to their peers' comments.

Educators can also use social networks to motivate students by sending simple reminders, providing encouragement outside of the classroom on a more efficient basis, and creating discussion/information pages with useful links, prompts, and other mass-transmitted as well as personalized guidance. These sites also present new challenges and opportunities in terms of motivating learners to become more responsible and self-aware citizens, through the universality of the access to information on their online profiles (Cain 2008). Linking behaviors and modes of self-portrayal directly to real-world consequences of both practical opportunities as well as prestige cannot help but motivate students towards greater degrees of civic responsibility (Cain 2008).

Authenticity and Constructivist Learning

There are of course other online technologies and websites that can also prove hugely useful to educators; the creation of student blogs that allow for peer comments and interaction as well as the concept of community-edited encyclopedias both encourage critical thinking and verbal communication skills (Woo & Reeves 2007). Interaction is a foundational element of learning in the constructivist perspective, and though not all interaction is actually conducive to learning -- especially not in a formal educational setting -- properly planned and implemented online interactions can create real-world learning experiences through authentic discussion rather than rote instruction (Woo & Reeves 2007). Similarly, the use of PowerPoint and similar information-organizing programs can transmit a skill set that is both directly useful in the real world, as increasing employment opportunities require the ability to coherently and succinctly present information to others, and that is also useful in a more abstract sense in that students begin to learn how to organize information in a highly visual manner. Technology enables students to learn process without divorcing it from the factual information and data inherent to traditional educational expectations.