How can teachers effectively use technology and integrate technology into instruction?

In order to give logical answers to this question, I believe we first need to redefine what school and instruction should be for according to the developments in today’s world and real needs of its people, and then consider what a teacher’s role in such a redefined education system can be.

In a TED (short for ‘Technology, Entertainment and Design’, a platform for ‘ideas worth spreading’) Talk, Ken Robinson, famous English author, speaker and international advisor on education, talks about 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish and how current education culture works against them and he tells us how to get out of the educational ‘death valley’ we now face.

In another, Seth Godin, author of many books that have been bestsellers around the world, talks about the future of education and what we can do about it.

Here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc , ‘How to escape education's death valley’ by Ken Robinson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc , ‘Stop Stealing Dreams’ by Seth Godin.

I think some of their valuable ideas can help us to better understand what schools, education and teachers’ roles in them will be like in the foreseeable future.

Having had some insights into the future of education and instruction, we can talk about effective use of technology in it, I imagine.

Let's say we have got a landscape or a portrait or any other picture that we need to describe in writing. That will naturally take a lot of depiction, probably a long piece of writing. Similarly, those who read this writing will have to make a lot of effort to picture it in their minds like trying to fit together the pieces of a puzzle.

One might ask and say: "Why don’t you just show me the picture itself, eliminating the need to write and read about it? Please just show me the picture instead if you can."

Using technology in education is something like that, revealing the picture itself. So, we would get rid of some primitive methods of teaching and learning through technology, I suppose.

As part of a research trying to find answers to the effective use of technology in education, I will particularly focus on the internet.

Please have a look at this website:

https://www.edx.org/

It’s the place where you can take great online courses from the world’s best universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Berkeley University of California.

For free!

Let’s try to find out how