Remember Anything

In recent years, various applications of modern technologies have expanded to bringing improvements to classroom learning experiences. Students can now say goodbye to yawn fests with boring classroom discussions. Imagine watching your lessons in audio-video format. That sure is fun! In providing more engaging and interactive exercises, informative media, computer learning games as well as practice tests, the integration of technology in the classroom has reinforced the effectiveness of the instruction received by today’s students.

Today’s students tend to become active, participatory, and experiential learners, being highly social individuals both in personal and online environments. In this age of instant messaging and social network accounts such as MySpace and Facebook, there are a number of venues in which students can interact and share information. The emergence of advanced computer gadgets such as cell phones and laptops has made them very well versed in multi-tasking. Observe them playing online games while downloading pictures and chatting with friends in the other windows on their computer. Now that’s multi-tasking! Imagine expanding the availability of educational instructions on the gadgets that they use every minute of the day. Setting up an online account where instructions, videos, and materials for the concepts discussed inside the classroom can easily be downloaded—now that’s a whole new world of learning with technology.

The integration of modern technology establishes significant learning gains over conventional instructional strategies. However, such technologies need an instructional design to deliver the stated benefits. Aside from providing more effective instructional tools that create more meaningful, coherent, and engaging representations of knowledge, technology brings welcome changes to learning experiences. It empowers students by helping them become productive participants in the learning process.

For instance, one classic learning problem that the use of multi-media instructions has solved is the student’s comprehension skills. The use of audio-video materials in story telling increases the student’s potential to synthesize their knowledge and ideas with the content of the story. Digital story telling invites students to analyze, apply, and evaluate ideas, which will reflect their understanding of the studied material. It presents visual images that serve as memory markers by conveying meanings, establishing better retention for the content of the story discussed. As a result, students more easily remember the concepts they discussed in the classroom.

When students grow tired of imagining the actual appearance of the planet or the animal they are studying, the use of modern tools can leave less room for frustrations in understanding the subjects discussed inside the classroom. The use of multi-media easily establishes the organizational groundwork on which students can stimulate their learning capacities and develop anticipation for future learning activities. Students as well as teachers can better explore the nature and meaning of concepts that they study as they are provided with the video, still images and other materials of the object or concept being studied. As a result, students develop the initiative to expand their understanding of a concept and make connections to other related concepts and teachers become more effective in facilitating learning activities.

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