How technology helps teachers
Technology can help teachers in a number of different ways. The following selection, adapted from article Teachers… Training… and Technology, shows you how.
- ICTs and properly developed multi-media materials can enhance the initial preparation by providing good training materials, facilitating simulations, capturing and analyzing practice-teaching, bringing into the training institution world experience, familiarizing trainees with sources of materials and support, and training potential teachers in the use of technologies for teaching-learning.
- ICTs open a whole world of lifelong upgrading and professional development by providing courses at a distance, asynchronous learning, and training on demand. ICTs have the advantage of ease of revisions and introduction of new courses in response to emerging demands.
- ICTs can help to motivate teachers by breaking the professional isolation from which many suffer. With ICT, they can easily connect with headquarters, with colleagues and mentors, with universities and centres of expertise and with sources of teaching materials.
- Teachers can interact with students over a physical distance
- ICTs enable simulation, role-playing, and decision-making exercises
- Virtual communities facilitate sharing of information, ideas, and experiences as well as collaborating on projects, exchanging materials, and communicating with colleagues and students
- Teachers' learning experiences may be linked directly with instruction going on their own classrooms; after online training sessions they can apply the new techniques or use the new materials in their classes immediately
- Teachers in remote locations can access online libraries and current research which can significantly enhance learning and enable individual initiative
- Carefully designed computer-mediated professional development can dramatically reduce the cost of teacher training