Hari Here: December 2022

Mount Tabor Training College

Pathanapuram

EDU 03: Technology and Communication in Education

Assignment

Topic Teacher in a Digital Era: Changing Roles and Competencies

Submitted to,

Ms Laiji R

Assistant Professor

Submitted by,

Prabhav A K

S1 English

Introduction

Present-day classrooms are much different from those which existed five years ago. Earlier, teachers used books, boards, charts, or other teaching aids, but now it has shifted to computers, smart boards, tablets, smartphones and so on. The corona pandemic helped a lot in boosting the use of technology in classrooms. As technology is advancing teachers should also advance to use efficient technology as a tool to improve the education system.

Mastering ICT skills and utilizing ICT towards creating an improved teaching and learning environment is of utmost importance to teachers in creating new learning. Education has become highly technology based. This great transformation poses challenges to educators regarding their basic tenets, to deploy the media in creative and productive ways, as “teachers are the central forces in tapping the learning opportunities created by ICT”. Teachers should be equipped with certain abilities that would help them improve their teaching experience in modern-day classrooms. The major reason for this is that we are living in the information technology era and there is an information explosion that is taking place. Earlier, teachers were considered as full vessels which pours knowledge into empty vessels which are the students. But nowadays, students are not empty vessels. They are equipped with all knowledge that is available on the web. So, the role of a teacher changes from a knowledge provider to a knowledge generator.

Teachers act as facilitators to guide students in navigating an increasingly connected world. Educators, should aim to consistently use technology to inform, support, and propel this learner-centred approach to education and support future initiatives to implement technology in support of education reform, enhanced learning, and increased student achievement. Educators should be able to create, access, tag, and manage, blogs, online discussions, and banks of test items to achieve this necessary balance amongst teaching, learning, and growth.

Changing Roles of Teacher

As all information is available and easily accessible on the internet, the necessity of teachers in the next generation is being questioned. The role of the teacher as a person who provides facts on some particular topic has almost come to an end. The teacher is no more the knowledge provider. But s/he has a broader role. According to N Shah, as the teacher and the textbook get replaced by these digital recourses of learning, there are many attempts that try and expand the information scope and repertoire of the teacher, firmly believing that installing smart boards and digitally connecting the classrooms is the solution. However, it is obvious to anybody with their ear on the ground that we will need to re-evaluate the role of teachers, and construct our education systems, not so be pale imitations of older classrooms, as we see in the rise of the massively open online courseware. We don’t need apps and hacks for learning, or gamified platforms, though they do help, what we need is an introspection into the role of teacher, not competing with the internet but helping students learn, think, reflect, and implement their knowledge, as they collaborate and contribute, while “learning on the internet”.

Competencies of a Teacher in a Digital Era

The competencies of teachers in a digital era can be organized into five aspects:

1. Productivity

2. Communication

3. Research

4. Media

5. Presentation

1. Productivity

Teachers should be able to produce and manage learning documents. It includes the preparation and publishing of materials like newsletters and handouts for students. The teacher should also be able to make students produce digital documents. Teachers should also be able to analyse quantitative data which includes administrative work such as putting student test scores into a spreadsheet and analysing them, as well as preparing curriculum materials with digital tables and graphs of curriculum content. The teacher should also be able to organize things in graphical formats by using word processors and presentation applications.

2. Communication

The teacher in a digital era should be able to communicate using tools like e-mail, instant messaging and so on. S/he should also be able to collaborate on online platforms such as blogs, wikis, chats and audio for sharing information with students and collecting feedback from them. Teachers should also be able to publish resources online which would make them available for students outside the particular teacher’s school.

3. Research

The teacher should be able to use more effective online search tools for research. This would help the teacher in producing the most effective, useful and safe resources online in the classroom. The teacher should be able to evaluate and compare online information and sources. The teacher should also know a wide variety of ways in which s/he could save resources from the internet.

4. Media

The teacher should be aware of various technologies and should be able to distinguish various kinds of media to cater proper educational resources to differently-abled students. Teacher should know to capture, edit and arrange various information in the form of slides, audio, videos or others. The teacher could thus create and archive a detailed profile of teaching and learning materials digitally. The teacher could also produce multimedia content by combining images, audio, video and so on.

5. Presentation

Teachers must know how to present study materials effectively. It can be in the form of slides, videos or anything. Teachers should also be able to deliver presentations using various techniques and employ new media devices such as smart boards to tiny iPods for learning.

Conclusion

Teachers are central to the effectiveness of the technology infrastructure that serves education. In the digital era, there are a lot of changes in technologies advanced in the classroom. Teachers are changing their teaching methods and using modern technologies in the classroom. So, technology as educators helps students to shape their future. A teacher in the digital era should be employed with all the skills to make students interested and attracted to the class. In the present age, teachers’ role in the traditional sense seems unnecessary because all the information is easily accessible through the internet. In such situations, teachers could act as a scaffolder since they need not explain facts to students.

References

Frick, Eric. Information Technology Essentials Volume 1: Introduction to Information Systems. Vol. 1, Independently published, 2019.

Wegerif, Rupert, and Lyn Dawes. Thinking and Learning With ICT: Raising Achievement in Primary Classrooms. RoutledgeFalmer, 2004.