Mataz-Tech1100-Reflections

I felt that this lesson or this topic is very rich in examples, and it is very useful if I will need in future to know more about educational technology because it has a very wide range of keywords and sources of information related to educational technology. I will begin with the 5 main ways of emerging the technologies, which are: 1. the increasing of blended learning environment, 2. Personalized learning, 3. Automation in education, 4. Immersive learning experiences, 5. Smart environment for learning. There is a wide range of examples of that, including online learning, personalized e-books, learning portals, virtual worlds, and mobile learning. There are also many useful sources if anybody decides to increase his knowledge in educational technology, like journals and associations. The most common journals 1. British Journal of Educational Technology which provides information for all levels, 2. Computers and Education which has well-researched articles about how digital technology ...

After learning about this topic, I was very surprised and amazed at how important educational technology is in both academic and non-academic aspects. In the academic aspect, the major goal of it is to improve performance. If we take a look at the common diagram of 21st-century skills, we will see that the third sector of skills that students need to acquire is “information, media, and technology skills” which indicates that technology is one of the essential pillars of education. This skill and the rest of the skills that had mentioned in the diagram need a lot of effort to be gained by students, and one solution for teachers to facilitate this process is to make students engage in real-world problem-solving, and to do that we must integrate educational technology. So that is another evidence of the importance of educational technology. As for a non-academic aspect, it is worth noting that nowadays it is very common that adults continue learning due to following their interests or imp...

This lesson took me deeper into technology integration. I could deduce that to achieve successful integration we need us to not focus on the technology itself, but we need to focus on using and exploit it for educational purpose. And in relating that to what we have studied, we cannot ignore any of the six foundational pillars, because if we did, then there will be suboptimal outcomes in terms of acceptance by users and impact on learning, instruction, and performance. Technology integration differs a bit from the use of technology individually, for example, in school settings, technology integration is taken up under the rubric of “Tech-PACK” or “TPACK”, which refer to Technological, Pedagogical, And Content Knowledge. However, in every sector and at every level, the need to effectively integrate technology into education is a constant concern. So, all of that indicates that technology integration is not simple and superficial, but it is a complex and challenging process.

I believe that the instructional design models will help me a lot as a future teacher. It is very necessary to organize the workflow and planning the lessons. ASSURE model one of the common and important models. It is a useful model for creating a lesson plan. This  model consists of 6 stages, as the number of the letters of its name. Actually, each letter of its name refers to a stage of it. A, refers to analyze learners, like their gender, ages, preferences, prior knowledge …etc. First S, refers to state objectives,  describing what the learner will do as a result of the lesson. The second S, refers to select methods, media, and materials. Such as select the appropriate method for the given learning task, select available materials, modify existing materials, or design new materials to help accomplish this task. And U, refers to utilize methods, media, and materials, which means that for each type of media or materials, the teacher selects and describes how they are going to...

In this topic, there are many points I liked, and it attracted my attention. It really motivates me as a future teacher to improve myself and renew my knowledge continuously. I liked the motivational words that say that we should enhance our educational process every single day, it makes me planned to apply this thing in the future. So, if we relate that with technology, we will find that we need to update ourselves in technology, like looking for new strategies and methods which can enhance the teaching-learning process. I completely agreed with the statement “the technology cannot replace teacher”, because the teacher one of the main pillars of the educational process. But instead of that, we can mix up the two (teachers and technology) and get a powerful educational process. The writer predicted that in the future there will be new technologies and methods which will have the ability to support the learning process, but it will be challenging to use these technologies effectively, a...