If you need a little excitement in your life, walk into any faculty lounge or meeting room and announce that you think self-paced software is the wave of the future for education. You’re sure to find yourself swarmed by a mob of lesson planning critics who argue that technology can never replace the learning experience afforded by a highly qualified, dedicated teacher. And for the most part, they’d be right. There’s something to be said for a knowledgeable instructor whose mission is to ensure that all students get exactly the educational experience they need.
But with more and more schools being held to strict curriculum standards while faced with increasing student populations and decreasing budgets–let alone the warnings about teacher shortages–technology-driven self-paced learning starts to look like a good idea. The problem comes in when the technology isn’t cost effective while also not producing results.
Case in point was the great digital textbook craze, which hasn’t taken off like supporters expected it to. When ebooks and tablets first joined forces, education experts predicted the end of print textbooks. The cost savings, the environmental impact, the ability to include amazing curricular enhancements for next to nothing, and a host of other highly touted features were supposed to signify the end of heavy backpacks in exchange for a Star Trek-esque learning environment.
Instead, the reality hit: the outrageous costs of student textbooks–even in the public school sphere–is due to the expense of having Ph.D.-level experts write the content, not in the printing or the shipping. Digital editions were hardly a savings to cash-strapped school systems who then had to find a way to ensure all students had connectivity access and the required technology to consume them.
On the self-paced software front, critics have cried foul when it comes to schools looking to replace teachers with laptops; and arguably, sitting a class of forty high school math students at a bank of computers has no guarantee of producing the same educational outcomes that one well-qualified teacher can exact.
But new software profiled this week in Slate may offer a solution that certainly won’t replace teachers, but stands to fix many of the issues that digital textbooks and self-paced software couldn’t address. The beauty of programs like ALEKS is in its ability to adapt to student responses to provide a more individualized instructional method. By gauging how and for how long students interact with the topics on their screens, the software quickly becomes structured for every single student, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that schools (and even learning software titles) have used all along.
Rather than replacing teachers, software like ALEKS is better suited to helping reach students whose needs were not being met under the traditional model, whether it was due to a learning deficit or to a student’s higher level of achievement. In the hands of this same qualified, dedicated “dream” teacher, this type of AI software approach stands to help all students achieve at their own optimal levels, something that the centuries’-old model hasn’t been able to do so far.
The post Digital Classrooms: Is This Really Education? appeared first on TechBeat.
via TechBeat http://ift.tt/1jQtpvb
WinZip is the most trusted way to work with compressed files. No other compression utility is as easy-to-use or offers the comprehensive and productivity-enhancing approach that has made WinZip the gold standard for file-compression tools. You can quickly and securely zip and unzip files to conserve storage space, speed up e-mail transmission, and...
Icecream Slideshow Maker is an application, which can create slideshows with music from your photos. The application is very simple to use; Simpy add images, select the effect and duration of each slide, add and customize music, then press “Create”. After your slideshow is ready you can upload it to YouTube right away. KEY FEATURES INCLUDE: Ice...
Icecream Screen Recorder is an application for screen capture and taking screenshots. Icecream Screen Recorder can both take screenshots and capture video and you can even switch between these 2 modes very easily; Just press the button in the top left corner of the application. Key Features Include: Video can be taken with or without system sound...
Icecream Image Resizer is a free set of tools for fast image resizing.The application supports resizing of images of such formats as jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, tiff. Key Features Include: Vertical recognition system automatically applies reverse image settings for vertically oriented images which makes resizing of both vertical and horizontal...
ToDoList is a jack-of-all-trades organizer software that goes far beyond managing shopping lists. The tool allows to create short and precise task lists but also handles complex project flows. ToDoList presents tasks in a tree-view and visualizes their dependencies. Single project tasks are assigned individual priorities that can be adjusted or mar...
LogMeIn Hamachi is a VPN service that easily sets up in 10 minutes, and enables secure remote access to your business network, anywhere there's an Internet connection. It works with your existing firewall, and requires no additional configuration. Hamachi is the first networking application to deliver an unprecedented level of direct peer-to-peer ...
