ICT in Education around the world-They key trends

Digital transformations in Information Communication Technology

In the highly modernized and technological world, the Information Communication Technology has increased its usage and trends simultaneously. There are various numbers of significant parts of education. Both teaching and schooling has been changed with the new context. ICT offers some of the characteristics which are essential in our day-to-day life.

The introduction of latest ICT trends and technologies has changed the method of living, working and communication for the majority of people. This leads to the educational approach that made the society and school closer. In the 21^st century, the education system must follow the formation that positively contributes to the development of critical citizens and better society.

• Growth in the technological sector

In the earlier days, the world has witnessed a phenomenal growth in computer network, communication technology, and information technology. The development of new broadband communication services has created numerous possibilities to use a variety of new technology tools for both teaching and learning system.

Communication and computer integration offers unusual opportunities for education systems. It carries a capacity to integrate, enhance and interact with each other over a wide geographic distance to achieve the learning objectives. The growth of these systems along with their ease of use and the power and diversity of information transfer enables students and teachers to access to a world beyond the classroom.

2.1 A shift in technological Paradigm

Education is experiencing major paradigm shifts in its teaching and learning practices across the globe. This is due to the latest trends in Information Technology that enables an effective learning environment. In earlier times, learning through facts, drill, and practices, rules and procedures was more adaptive while learning through projects and problems, inquiry and design, discovery and invention, creativity and diversity, action and reflection is perhaps more fitting for the present times.

The major stamp of this learning transition varies from teacher-centered to learner focus paradigm. During the last three decades, the changes in the educational environment have been phenomenal. The focus and the role of the learner and technology have been changed drastically from traditional instruction to the virtual learning environment.

2.1.1 Create interactive sessions within the curriculum

The shift from teaching to learning can create a more engaging learning environment for teachers and learners. This new environment involves a change in their roles. The role of the teachers will change from knowledge transmitter to facilitator, knowledge navigator to co-learner. The new role of teachers demands a new way of thinking and understanding of the new vision of the learning process. Learners will have more responsibilities for their own learning. They usually seek out, find, synthesize, and share their knowledge with others.

3.1 Creating new cultures

The integration of ICT into the idea of teaching and learning always places pedagogy over technology. It is not significant to master ICT skills, but rather it involves using ICT to improve teaching and learning. The major emphasis of ICT infusion in training must improve learning, motivate and engage learners, promote collaboration, foster inquiry, and exploration, and create a new learner-centered learning the culture. It permits the move from the reproductive model of teaching and learning model to an independent, autonomous learning model. Further, it promotes initiation, creativity and critical thinking with independent research.

3.1.1 The role of learners/teachers

Learners are expected to collect, select, analyze, organize, extend, transform and present knowledge using ICT in an authentic and active learning paradigm. On the other hand, teachers are expected to create a new flexible and open learning environment with an interactive, experiential and multimedia-based delivery system.

3.1.2 How ICT will help them develop a new culture?

Communication and collaboration without boundaries make learners autonomous and allow teachers to bring the whole world into classroom activities. It is ultimately important to understand the roles of ICT and its related technological trends in promoting educational changes. It uses the basic principle where ICT changes the distribution and ownership of information resources in the space of teaching and learning. Thus, it further changes the relationship between educational participants.

While designing any innovative teaching and learning environment using ICT, the teacher should always keep the learning at the center of all activities, pedagogy should be at the heart and integration of pedagogy-technology should be the central focus.

4.1 Pedagogical practices

ICT must be used to improve teaching and learning. It is the key to pedagogy-technology integration. But the combination of two can be complex.

For instance, consider a scenario of a young teacher who has just started to use ICT for his daily classroom activities of teaching and learning.

1. Lesson plans - To start with, they need to prepare lesson plans and compile lesson materials for the classroom lecture. In order to prepare such materials, one has to go through the act of drafting phase. Also, they must consider the editing phase, revising phase and finally publishing the lesson plans and course contents.
2. Word processor - It can be a great help to accomplish this task in a professional and productive way. It will help you avoid repetition, and concentrate on the quality of the course materials.
3. Performance lists - The teachers also need to make lists of the name of the students for monitoring and recording their academic performance and to analyze and perform a statistical analysis to take some corrective measure if any, in the lesson plan, delivery of instruction.
4. Spreadsheets – It can be a good choice for creating class lists, recording their performance and executing statistical analysis upon them. While delivering the class lectures, any innovative teacher needs to draw diagrams, show pictures, animate some objects to explain critical concepts, even play some video clipping of real-time operation.

 All these multimedia applications can assure very productive, interesting, motivating, interactive and quality delivery of classroom instruction. Presentation software like powerpoint can be a good choice for teachers for performing such tasks.

5.1 Enhance learning and teaching practices

Broadly, ICT tools help to open up opportunities for learning by enabling four major key processes in transforming teaching and learning as follows:

1. Access ideas and information from diverse sources through searching, locating, selecting, and authenticating material in a wide range of multimedia forms;
2. Extend ideas and information through processing, manipulating, analyzing & publishing material in different multimedia forms;
3. Transform ideas and information into new or different forms through synthesizing, modeling, simulating and creating material in many multimedia styles and formats;
4. Share ideas and information across local, national and international networks by interacting electronically with others in actual and/or delayed time.
5. Access, extend, transform and share represent key processes by which students learn and become independent learners and self-starters.

 6.1 Global trends in education and ICT

 Higher education is also slowly adopting the digital era. Online certifications, value-added certifications are becoming popular in the college-going students. Most of such courses are targeted to improve the employability of the students. Therefore, there are some latest trends in information 

and communication technology like:

6.1.1 Mobile Learning - Mobile smartphones have become an indispensable tool due to the prohibition of new advancement in both software and hardware. In the telecommunication industry, the cell phone contains fixed-line technology known as leapfrog. It suggests that mobile devices having computing capabilities and internet access can overtake the personal computers in regards to the information appliance of choices within the classroom.

6.1.2 Cloud computing - There is a wide range of applications that are standing alone. It includes desktop computers or server farms accessible through the internet. The indication and application of this trend in the education system are huge that makes the information appliances cheaper and available. It does not require the size of the PC or the processing power. The will provide pervasive connectivity to the accessibility of information within a cloud technology.

6.1.3 One-to-One computing - This is the most widely used and recent educational trend inside the classroom. It will provide an information appliance to each and every learner along with creating learning environments. Further, it helps in imagining universal accessibility towards the technologies. Classrooms must prepare for the availability at universal level. It must be based on personal learning devices through hardware involvement. For instance, it includes laptop per child (OLPC), a smartphone, a net computer and re-emergence of the tablet.

6.1.4 Universal learning - The emergence of robust connectivity infrastructure helps in the development of ability across the globe. The universal design in education provides various learning opportunities to students anywhere anytime. It requires tutorials of traditional lessons. Additionally, the internet and hardware accessibility of virtual teachers and mentors offer the opportunities for the self-paced, peer-to-peer and deeper learning.

6.1.5 Gaming – The massive multiplayer and other online game experience is common for the young generation. It offers various opportunities in order to increase social interactions and civic engagement by making use of games. This incredible success helps the students to focus on active participation by building interaction and incentives. For this, they use current educational methods that are not falling short. The educational games effectively and efficiently attract the attention and interest of the learners.

6.1.6 Personalized learning - With the advent of time, the educational systems are regularly investigating the use of technologies. It aims at understanding the knowledge of the student and editing their teaching techniques prior to their learning. It helps in addressing both the learning styles and gaps. This will further help in classroom transformation by adjusting a pedagogy and content based on the needs of an individual. It must be associated with their weakness and strongness.

6.1.7 Redefinition of learning spaces - The classroom comprised of 30 desks in rows of 5. It may become evidence of the industrial age. It is due to the re-thinking of accurate learning environments that helps in focusing the cross-disciplinary, collaborative and student-centered learning. Concepts like circular tables, light, colors and individual spaces for both teachers and students open up the learning spaces for project-based learning. It helps in increasing its emphasis.

6.1.8 Teacher-generated open-content - The school systems are empowering the networks and the teachers in order to identify and create effective learning resources in the classroom. Most of the online texts allow editing and addition to the teachers and customize the material for their own purposes. It also allows the students to receive the tailored and edited copy that could suit the pace and style of the course.

6.1.9 Smart portfolio assessment - The management, collection, retrieving and sorting of related data towards learning could help the teachers to understand the customized content. It also includes learning gaps, and pedagogical approaches. The methods of smart portfolio assessments are increasingly moving towards formative assessments. It allows the real-time data to put the high pressure on exams as the mark of excellence.

These tools are widely available so that the students can gather their work. They can use the form of online portfolio whenever they add the blog post, tweet, and photo to an online service. It will directly appear in the personal portfolio which can be accessed through teachers and peers.

6.1.10 teaching managers/mentors - In the classroom, the role of the teachers can be transformed in terms of knowledge to an instructional manager. It will help in providing a guide and direction to the students through the individual learning pathways. It creates collaborative learning opportunities, identifying important learning resources and providing support and insights to the formal and official class time.  

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is a great need to create world-class content marked for student learning across different categories. They are available to each and every student at just the click of a button. The interactive learning systems will ensure the skill and learning development with the demands of today’s world. Also, it includes a proliferation of different access devices, content ecosystem, and evolvement of telecom infrastructure. It can potentially fulfill the knowledge gap among the students. In addition, it considers the capability gap among the teachers and overcoming the issue of scalability in education.

These trends will continue to challenge the delivery models important for formal education and are practiced in most of the countries.

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