Students and Teachers of the 21st Century.. [Task 1]

After more than 10 years of studying, I have to be honest and say that only when I step into the world of University do I get to use technology as my tool for learning. Technology, had always been an unknown territory that I was always curious to explore but never got the chance to do it.

But time has changed everything now. Today's young learners however tends to take these opportunity for granted. While we were used to the thirst for technological use in our learning before, they can easily access to its use as the central of their educational purposes, communications and daily needs. The questions now, is how we as teachers should guide the students to make use of the available technology around them to the max!

Changes in Students' Learning

Learning is no longer bordered by the four walls of the classroom, but borderless and unlimited. Students becoming active learners who initiates learning and play a role in active thinking about informations and knowledge that they are to learn.

With the access to the internet, students can gather just about any informations right on their very fingertips. Students will become more and more a teacher of their own learning. Learning is no longer the traditional - teachers as input, learners as receiver -. Access to informations enables students to conduct their own researches and discovery learning. Indeed, now students can have a choice on what they want to learn, how the intend their learning to take place and how much informations they want to generate.

The wide and broad access to the outside world provide students the communication medium where interactions and collaborations among students from around the world can take place. Students can share informations and learnings with each other. Discussions and debates could took place online where students would be able to allow themselves to be exposed to different perspectives of different views of the people around the world. Malaysian students would no longer be oxtracised by the world community, as we are no longer constricted to the limited traditional perspective.

The available technology also enables students to accomplish a more difficult and complex tasks. For example, students can represent their learning in high-quality colourful graphs and able to examine and understand the deeper levels of the graphs. In Science for example, students can learn about the human body thoroughly inside and out. Experiments can be done online without the unnecessary lack of tools to hinder learning to take place.

In term of motivation, students' willingness to participate in learning has greatly improved compared to us previously. The enjoyment of learning using technology motivate students to learn and take useful advantage of it. Students would be more aware of the relationship of their learning with the real world, creating a sense of need to gain knowledge in order to survive.

Changes in Teachers' Role and Responsibility

With the available softwares and applications, teachers would be able to employ the variety of recources to create different and much more interesting teaching lessons. Now it would not only be chalks, textbooks and papers, but videos, musics, coursewares and all the other things that technology has in store for us.

As the guider and facilitator who enables such impressive changes as I have discussed before to take place, we as teachers has the responsibility to enhance our skills in the techological field. We should know how to differentiate a good resources from the many available to us. Our skill to manipulate these technology is important as we should be able to make use of the technology not only to encourage students to be independent learners, but also to teach them on how to be smart researchers. Below this is a youtube video that I had come across that discuss on the importance and methods to be "cybersmart" in selecting the internet resources smartly in classrooms.

I agree with what Joyce Valenza (Library information Specialist Consultant and Author) from the video. She sad that the available informations would only be useful if the students knows how to search it well and if teachers are able to compile the information to make them accessible to the students.

And what Gary Price (Library information Specialist Consultant and Author) said on the video has left a great impression on me. He said, I quote "Just because somebody puts together content on a webpage doesn't mean that its an information". I agree as I also think that there can be many unreliable sources on the net and the teachers who are unaware might put too much reliance on them resulting in misleading lessons. He also said that both teachers and students need to analyse the resources available to them and also think about the motivational advantages that they would be able to gain.

Thus I think that teachers (us) nowadays should have the skills to choose the most appropriate informations and share this skills and knowledge with the students - as the specialists said on the video, its even more important for students to know these research skills as they would be the one who will choose what they want to learn from. This video is quite informative and I think should be viewed by our friends as this topic is relatively very close to what we are learning now - Technology in Primary Classroom.

In conclusions, it is the students role to make wise choices and take advantage of what technology can bring to their learning and for teachers, it is their role to sharpen their skills in the technology area so that they can be the best guide and facilitator that enable the best learning to take place.

sources:
1. EDReformStudies
2. Webquest
3. Next Generation Learning
4. EDUCAUSE
5. cybersmart @ youtube