Educational Technology

Educational Technology

Being new to the Instructional Technology Specialist role, I was pretty excited to come across some important educational technology research.  With so much educational technology available, it is hard to know where to start and how to implement the use of technology in order to make it impactful to the students' education.  Are certain technology initiatives benefiting the learning of students and what is technology should we be investing our time and resources in?  There is a resource that has set out to answer those questions for those in the field of education- Project Tomorrow's Speak Up.

https://tomorrow.org/speakup/index.html

Project Tomorrow's Speak Up Report

When I first visited Project Tomorrow's website, I came across a report that immediately stood out to me.  Project Tomorrow teamed up with BrainPop to study the importance of coding in schools servicing students in grades K-8 according to students, parents, and administrators- see the full report here.  This report was of particular interest to me because my district has made some investments in providing coding experiences to students in grades 3-8.  While I feel coding can be extremely engaging for students, I was curious to know why the push for coding has been so significant.  

giphy.com

To no surprise, the study found students, parents, and administrators see coding as an important skill set for students to learn skills essential to future endeavors.  The reasoning, however, was one I hadn't thought of before.  Parents and administrators believed coding to be a good outlet for students to show their creativity, and creativity was found to be as important as literacy to parents.  In fact, 73% of parents believed creativity was an important skill for their child to develop in order to be successful in the future.  Another skill which was addressed by teaching coding was developing critical thinking skills. This is a skill I believed to be most evident in my work with teaching coding to students. There are many situations where the students have to change their perspectives in order to solve the problems they face.

While there are many opportunities for technology integration into elementary education, coding appears to be one that is worth integrating because of the benefits it provides to 21st century students.