Educational Technology Philosophy

Educational Technology Philosophy

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
(Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, On Philosophy of Education)

From the above quotation, Rousseau states that education plays as the aid to complete men by providing them with strength in critical thinking which would finally allows the cultivation in their lives. I am strongly believe that education serves a purpose in creating the human mind to be able to comprehend what is happened in the world around them. Moreover, education provides the value recognition to us. For instance, one can be able to make the life meaningful by knowing the ways to interpret meanings in a certain language. In addition, education can also be the assistant to many ones to communicate their ideas to the world.

Roles of learners and teachers are various by their responsibilities. The learners are not limited to the ignorance which limits their ability to learn. Every person deserves the chances in education. I would like to assert that people can learn and become improved from receiving the opportunities to learn. The learning experiences are able to create under the guidance of the teachers and they also be the ones who know what to achieved from learning. Then learners would know what to do in their ways. The methods in pragmatism approach provide effective learning outcomes. As the teachers encourage the learners to involve with the process of education discovery, the values of education needed to keep in mind as the objectives for learning process. In addition, technology assists education by providing learners with assistance to expose to the chances. As the teacher who looks practice as the contribution to learning outcomes, I would manage the environment to be equipped with possibilities for learners to do their own experiments. My students are not judged with absolute achievement, but they will be provided the resources that allow them to reach the goals in their ways as much as learners prefer. The teachers represent as the facilitators who assist them to experiment with the learning.

Based on the problem which each learner needs to cope with, the pragmatism-based teacher should consider this as the primary requirement to develop the teaching plan. Technology would be the aid to fulfill the weakness of the learners. Teachers who consider the problems of the students would find it challenging to develop the personal strategy in solving individual problems. It is important to teacher to assess the background knowledge of the learners to be able to put the right method in teaching. A large number of technologies in education have been developed everyday which makes us necessary to keep pace with them in order to be able to select suitable choice to the classroom situation. For example, different compatibility of file types from Microsoft Word and iMac sometimes cause difficulty in displaying the files or the different plug-in programs to view video media files are only workable in each file type. These uncompatibility problems seem to be the issues in education because the different file types from different students could causes technical problem in viewing the submission. Web 2.0 application such as GoogleDoc web application could solve the problem for teachers who receive the unrecognized file types to their computers because the Internet is the common platform that everyone uses and those files can universally run on GoogleDoc. In addition, file sharing is another example issue of how technology facilitates education. Many teachers need to distribute documents to the students. Most of the times, files are attached with the e-mail sending to students to download. This way has commonly done in many courses for many years. The innovative web application such as Scribd.com could assist the learning process with ease by adding instant displaying feature to the document before downloading the files. It also be able to work with popular social networking website such as Facebook.com. The teachers and students can collaboratively work with each other online in real time and creating learning experience in the active way.

Education technology philosophy in my belief is on the basis of pragmatism which encourages learners to explore learning opportunities in their real life situation. Students need to provide the chances to experiment with anything around them to fine the best solution. The more they practice from trying new ways in learning is the more experience they will be able to deal with their problem in the future.