Technology has found its way into the lives of students of every age and learning ability in the past two decades. Still, with very young learners, there are ways education technology has to be carefully and correctly used.
Guidelines For Young Children Using Education Technology
Edtech, while enormously beneficial, must meet the requirements and comfort level of both young students and teachers to fulfill its functions. Here are a few guidelines to use edtech well in the case of younger learners.
Expanding The Horizons
Experts from The Kid Mom believe that one practical use of edtech is expanding the horizons of young children and encouraging them to appreciate, celebrate and learn about diversity and different cultures around the world. For obvious reasons, this can be done quicker in a lesson-based format incorporating multimedia formats like video clips and activities than it can be achieved through independent study of written texts.
Virtual field trips are another excellent education technology concept, and they proved invaluable during the Covid-19 days to help students learn. These trips virtually involved visiting heritage sites, museums, and old architecture. Edtech, when used well, can create opportunities for meaningful exchanges between students of different schools and countries. Recently, there has been work on software enabling special-needs children to learn more effectively.
Building Connections
Edtech is a brilliant tool for creating networking and communication between students, teachers, parents, and other experts, such as school administration or other officials, who weigh in on lessons from time to time. Edtech allows work and lessons to be transferred and shared seamlessly between different people, which lets the young learner benefit from everyone’s input.
Google portfolios allow the student’s work and progress report to be stored from term to term or grade to grade so new teachers can quickly assess their abilities and learning levels and adjust their workload. Parents can also play a supplementary role in how their child manages to learn in the classroom and at home without putting in the many hours it would traditionally take.
Asking The Right Questions
While young learners can benefit equally from more physically present and experimental types of learning, such as making educational models or merchandise from 3d printers for schools, edtech allows them to ask the right questions. Since there is room for interacting with teachers in the comfort of their own homes and involving their parents in the process, it opens the young learner up to countless possibilities.
Guidelines For Young Children Using Education Technology
Parents can ask questions from young learners regarding what they thought of any activity or content and what aspect they would like to look at in more detail. Feedback or messaging portals in many edtech software programs mean that teachers can be contacted if difficulty arises in the homework assignment. Furthermore, teachers are responsible for ascertaining whether the education technology is age-appropriate and whether it fulfills the learning requirements set by that grade level.