TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IN EDUCATION CHANGE

The past several decades, we have witnessed a fundamental economic transformation. The production, distribution and the use of new knowledge and information are major contributors to increased productivity and the creation of new high paying job. Technology provides the tools needed by the knowledge economy and the information society. Technologies enable us to connect with people and resources all over the world, to collaborate in the creation of knowledge, and to distribute and benefit from knowledge products. Technology and innovation also has created a massive change in the educational change and also the school system that provides more knowledge to the students through learning process.

(a)    Technology and Educational Change

With these economic and social developments as a backdrop, interest has been growing in the role that technology can play in improving education and changing schools. The features of new technologies are consistent with principles of the science of learning and hold promise for improving education. New technologies bring exciting curricula based on real world problems into the classroom and provide scaffolds and tools to enhance learning. The interactivity of technology is cited as a key feature that enables students to receive feedback on their performance, test and reflect on their ideas, and revise their understanding. Whereas networked technology can enable teacher and students to build local and global communities that connect them with interested people and expand opportunities for teacher learning.  Besides that, technology can be used as network communication, info retrieval and processing, multimedia and stimulation, and lastly data collection and analysis.

(b)   Technology and Innovative Classroom

Past two decades, technology has evolved and the number of computers in schools has grown significantly. Schools and classrooms are now wired to the Internet, and the use of the World Wide Web is common. The technologies used ranged from productivity tools and multimedia to e-mail and collaborative knowledge-building environments. This new technology characterized educational computing in terms of tutorial, tool and tutor function of ICT. While these categories defined different roles for technology, rarely was a role articulated for the teachers but it involve changes in the teaching methods, curricular goals or patterned social interactions. The tutor function in computer technology centered on a new set of activities that students would do with the computer. Hence, the roles of both teachers and students changed such that students were more actively involved in determining their own learning tasks and teachers supported and guided these activities. In short, technology played an important role in supporting these practices by enabling students to search for information, collect and analyze data, produce reports and other products, and communicate with others.

(c)    Technology and The Curriculum

Curriculum is an interrelated set of experiences that a student undertakes under the guidance of the school which means curriculum is not just the content and goals of education but also the instructional experience that are encountered in the classroom and the outcomes that result from these process. In the knowledge economy and information society, citizens must be able to use that information to solve complex problems and create new knowledge and cultural products. The students need to develop lifelong learning skills and that should be a major goal and outcome of education because students need those skills during working period. Technology can contribute to the realization of such a new vision of teaching and learning because the application of technology can support the changes. Networked communication can involve students in virtual communities of practice and technology learning tools can facilitate guided, reflective inquiry through extended projects in which students can generate complex products and acquire concepts and skills. Collaborative environments can enhance students’ joint construction of meaning via different perspectives on shared experiences.

 In conclusion, technology plays a central role in the innovations that were submitted to the study. The dominant technologies used in these classes were the majority than the innovative technologies. Technology in education is described as supporting changes in student practices, providing direct support for student learning providing additional resources, changing the time or structure of the classroom, and inhibiting undesirable outcomes.