By, Jacob Johnson
Learning is something humans do on a daily basis and it is how we grow, but learning looks a lot differently these days. From college campuses, to the smallest elementary schools, learning looks different, but despite the difficulties they are faced with teachers are finding ways to positively impact student learning.
The days of going to school to teach or learn and sit in a classroom everyday have not been seen in almost a year, replaced by virtual classes, but somehow the learning has not stopped.
How could learning look so different, but still be effective?
Some students and professors at Georgia Southern University have some ideas.
When talking with Dr Felecia Prince, a professor in early childhood education, she emphasized the use of all the technology resources available to both students and teachers in order to make this transition to online learning successful.
The technology that has either been created or used more because of the rush to online learning caused by the pandemic has made the transition as smoothly as could be expected.
Some students and teachers even prefer online instruction instead of the traditional classroom setting.
In fact, twenty-six percent of students polled said they preferred online learning, with nearly eighty percent of educators polled believing online learning is just as effective, according to a study done by the university of the Potomac.
While saying that leaning online is just as good as in person is debated in the academic community, one thing is for certain, this would be much more difficult without the technology students and teachers have been using over the past eight months.
“Last year we learned how taking notes with pen and paper would help you retain more information than typing your notes, but now we are learning how to use zoom and different presentation programs to teach effectively,” said Sunni Williams, a childhood education major at Georgia Southern University.
From teaching college students, to learning how to teach young students, technology has been the answer to help ease this learning curve that many educators and students have experienced.
Zoom has been one of the most used teaching tools, in fact nearly 100,000 schools across the world have used zoom for education and meetings, according to a blog post written by Eric Yuan, creator and owner of Zoom. Zoom now has more than 200 million daily users.
“The ability to share screens and still be able to interact with students virtually face to face is so important,” said Dr. Prince. “Just sending students something to read or watch does not have the same effect as having that interaction.
Even the free version of zoom can have up to one hundred participants in a virtual meeting and many professors record these meetings for students to be able to go back and watch what happened in class.
One problem that may arise from this increase in the daily use of technology is that older generations, both in the workforce and those who go back to school, may struggle to learn to effectively use it.
“I have seen a lot of older people that I work with not be able to keep up with the advances in technology over the last several years,” said Richard Boutin, a computer science and IT professional in Atlanta.
Although technology can be a learning curve for some, younger generations have been exposed to technology for a majority of their lives and this could help them overcome this obstacle to make the learning experience as normal and effective as possible.