We are in the process of reopening schools, taking stock of what happened during the period when they were closed due to the pandemic. Many people, including myself, advocate for the use of technology to help students make up for lost learning, rediscover their love of learning, and enable schools to monitor how students are faring.

Of course, no single technology can do the job on its own—after all, education cannot simply be outsourced to machines—but there are various types of technologies that can help teachers and administrators provide a more diverse learning experience that is better tailored to the needs of each individual. With the support of technology, students, teachers, and administrators have the opportunity to achieve what they could not on their own.

To help choose the right technology for the right moment, I recently developed a classification system that can be quite useful for deciding what to achieve in hybrid learning approaches, which combine the use of technology with face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, always under a teacher’s supervision.

I chose to list only the categories, without examples, so as not to give one supplier preference over another.

 

• Platforms offering activities related to curriculum content:

When people think of educational technology, they often assume it refers to technology designed to help students better learn the material in the curriculum. Yes, such technologies do exist! These are tools that provide curriculum-based content for students to learn and/or practice. They may be gamified or adaptive technologies, simulators, or incorporate virtual reality or augmented reality, or they may simply include self-correcting exercises.

This type of tool is very useful for fostering engagement and providing additional activities for students who need extra support in a specific area of the curriculum.

When adopting a tool like this, it’s ideal for teachers to be able to be assigned to students and track their learning reports. Without reports, how would they be able to monitor who is engaged and learning and who needs more help?

It is worth noting that curriculum support tools do not need to cover ALL the content specified in the curriculum for a course or subject area, but they should clearly describe the content they do cover. This allows the teacher to recommend them to students who need to learn exactly what the tools describe. The teacher is responsible for the other elements of the curriculum.

 

• Platforms offering activities related to extracurricular content or for which there may be a shortage of teachers:

A school cannot survive on a minimum curriculum alone. Students have different interests, or the school may decide that it wants to provide meaningful learning opportunities for its students to develop different skills—whether for personal reasons or to have more career opportunities in the future.

In this regard, tools for developing content and extracurricular skills can be very useful, as they can provide students with access to learning even where there are no teachers. Examples of content and skills that can be developed in this way include programming, foreign languages (English and Spanish—or others, why not?), physics and advanced mathematics, in-depth study of financial mathematics, environmental issues, and so on. High school curricula will soon fall into this category, as there will be interest in a variety of topics that home or public school teachers do not always master; these teachers will need support through technology or printed materials to address content in which they lack formal training but are interested in supporting their students’ learning.

It is important that platforms offering courses of this type be comprehensive in what they aim to teach and self-paced, if they are to address a shortage of teachers. They can be gamified, adaptive, or simply offer text/video plus automated assessment. It cannot be emphasized enough that they must provide reports so that teachers and school districts can track who has accessed the material and completed the required tasks.

 

• Content repository:

Another type of resource—which is different from curricular or extracurricular platforms designed to help students learn something specific through a particular sequence or methodological approach—is content repositories.

These tools function as a library of different types of digital content: digital libraries proper, repositories of news, photos, videos, teaching materials, teacher portals, and student portals.

Teachers and students use them to actively seek out content on a wide variety of topics. Therefore, it is essential that they have powerful search tools—by keyword, grade level, content type, and more. There are no limits to what one can learn and create with a good search of pre-curated materials.

 

• Tools that enable the creation of technological artifacts

Creating products using digital resources is quite different from learning the concepts in the curriculum. By creating technological artifacts, students learn to conduct research, learn to express themselves through digital genres, and often practice working in groups. The learning process is less structured, but very meaningful.

Any tool that allows for the creation of text, audio (podcasts), videos, spreadsheets, or programs can be used for this purpose. The final products students are asked to create can include books, blogs, social media content (even if it’s fictional for school use), films, news programs, documentaries, research projects, apps, games, robotics projects, and maker projects.

The tools used for this purpose—which also involves digital literacy, that is, the ability to use technology skillfully and with critical thinking—are generally tools available to the general public, rather than tools intended for use in schools. This is a good thing, since school is a place where students should also learn to use the resources that will be available to any citizen throughout their lives.

In an educational context, it is important to emphasize that creative projects should include some physical or virtual space for students to present or share their work so that teachers, classmates, and/or the broader community can view, comment on, and even evaluate it.

 

• Tools to support different methodologies:

So far, we've discussed tools that teachers adopt or recommend to students for various purposes. Now let's look at the tools teachers can use to reinforce the implementation of their teaching methodologies and approaches. These are education-focused tools that teachers configure to meet their objectives.

There are survey tools with automatic grading and gamified platforms that teachers can set up with their own questions on the topics they’re actually covering with their students. There are also tools that facilitate the flipped classroom, project-based learning, and MANY other approaches.

For these tools to effectively deliver on their promises, it is important that teachers truly have the freedom to configure the platforms according to their objectives.

 

• Videoconferencing Tools:

During the pandemic, most students and teachers have likely had some experience with tools for synchronous communication, whether in small or large groups. In terms of features specifically designed for teaching and learning, these tools can facilitate the division into smaller groups, track attendance, allow (or prohibit) recording, enable parallel chat discussions, support screen sharing, or allow scheduling.

The less a teacher has to worry about scheduling and student rosters, the better. Ideally, you should be able to click a button and see your class. Features that help organize groups and speaking turns, as well as share screens and files, also go a long way toward making a synchronous class more engaging.

 

• Asynchronous communication tools:

Communication between teachers and students or among students does not always have to be synchronous. To enable interaction over time, there are discussion forums and other tools that send messages to students and even to their parents.

It’s worth exploring the possibilities these tools offer for facilitating discussions, sharing ideas outside the classroom, and creating and managing communities of practice. For each purpose, one can imagine different features: the ability to send messages to groups, to evaluate what students post, and to easily search the materials included there are just a few examples.

 

• Diagnosis/predictive assessment

Moving a bit further into the realm of management, more and more tools are emerging that enable automatic assessment, identify the competencies and skills that students have mastered, and provide reports at different levels of aggregation (individual, class, grade, school, municipality). Some are even able to predict academic failure and dropout rates and identify social interaction among students. The way the data is presented makes all the difference for those who need to take action to resolve the problems identified in the assessments. It is the format in which the compiled data is presented that sets these tools apart from one another.

 

• LMS

Finally, we cannot fail to mention LMSs—learning management systems. These are, indeed, management tools that allow a school or a school district to compile and manage its entire range of technological content and learning records. In general, they provide a platform for delivering content and assessment tools that students, teachers, and administrators track in different ways.

When installed and managed strategically, an LMS can help manage all of the above, such as:

It can enable integration with various tools for curricular and extracurricular content and repositories; synchronous and asynchronous communication; and the academic system for enrollment and academic progression; it can provide a space for submitting assignments in video, audio, or text format and can also allow for the creation of assignments or assessments based on different approaches (grades, letter grades, competency-based, summative, formative, among others). An LMS should support diverse pedagogical approaches.

This type of tool can also provide reports with different levels of consolidation, visualization, and predictive analytics, with or without personalized messages. They can also direct information and content to students in a specific class and compile a wide variety of assessments and reports. Depending on the tool, it’s possible to send personalized messages to parents of students in a specific grade, to students who received low grades, to students who received high grades, and many other features.

 

We hope this article has shown that the possibilities for using technology in education are very diverse and can help students, teachers, and administrators achieve their goals. These tools are powerful. When teachers and administrators know what they want to achieve, they become extremely powerful and can be of great help in solving problems that we could not solve through human interaction alone.

So ask yourself: Where do you want to go? What do you need?

 

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