Training in technology use important for Education students

“Teachers have to have training in how to use the technology in a pedagogical setting,” said Rapp, a 20-year veteran secondary school teacher with a doctoral degree in learning and technology. “My interest is in how we can maximize the benefits of this technology, without overdoing it.”

Technology is a broad term that includes items such as pencils, chalkboards, and overhead projectors, said Rapp. In today’s schools the term has come to be associated with computers, digital tablets, smart phones, virtual reality stations, and the many programs and applications available for the devices.

While printed books remain standard for most secondary schools, teachers are increasingly ditching text books for entire courses downloaded or streamed to a computer or tablet and often the device is provided to all students by the school district, Rapp said.

“You can take your chemistry class (with you). (The digital course) will have classroom notes, labs, everything all the way through,” he said.

That’s just a basic level of education technology, however. Classrooms now are often connected to the internet and equipped with white boards and digital projectors that allow teachers to augment their presentations with PowerPoint slides, images and video.

The challenge for teachers is to use those tools in a manner that improves classroom outcomes, said Rapp.

“We can really throw a lot of information through technology, but the mind isn’t ready to handle that,” he said. “The adage that if a little is good, a lot is better, isn’t necessarily true for digital images and auditory stuff that is shooting out of these screens to students.”

Research has shown that applying 12 design principles in building multi-media lessons can be effective in managing students’ cognitive load, to enhance learning, said Rapp.

“Specific design principles we can use within the technology of teaching can leverage the human brain and what it is capable of learning,” he said. “With design principles we can adjust and increase outcomes. If you add too much stuff to your visuals, you can decrease outcomes.”

Using visual clues to highlight the most important parts of a text or image is an example of a design principle called signaling, said Rapp. Among the other principles are breaking up lessons into smaller pieces, placement of images and text on a screen, and not reading aloud the text shown on a screen.

Rapp said he covers 8 to 10 of the principles in his upper level courses.

“The ones I pick have a significant effect on learner outcomes,” he said. “If they are applied correctly, the visuals are designed around how the brain assimilates information.”

Rapp also takes advantage of technology applications to enhance traditional lecture style teaching. He uses computer recording equipment to screen cast short video clips that highlight important parts of a lesson. The videos are particularly helpful for students in online classes, but work in traditional classrooms, where they can serve as quick tutorials for students needing extra help, he said.

Electronic clickers that teachers can use to get individual responses from every student are another useful classroom tool, said Rapp. They allow for quick evaluation of students’ grasp of a particular subject, and can be used for quick quizzes or reviewing material before a test, among other purposes.  

“Clickers are awesome,” Rapp said. “Using them in classrooms, we had great results.”

Technological tools can also streamline the process of reviewing and commenting on students’ written work, and speed up grading and correcting test papers, which are some of the most time-consuming tasks for teachers.

As new technologies are increasingly incorporated into schools, the old-style classroom lecture is gradually being replaced by methods that research shows are more effective, such as small group project assignments, according to Rapp.

“The model that ‘I am the expert and I’m going to disseminate the information to you’ is very infrequent today,” he said. “That main lecture is on the way out.”

Although he is an ardent proponent of utilizing technology in classrooms, Rapp recognizes the potential that electronic devices, particularly smart phones, have to distract students from the lesson at hand. But teachers have always faced that challenge, he said.

“That’s not just with technology. Anything can be a distraction to students,” said Rapp. “Ultimately it comes down to classroom management.”

And teachers need to be prepared for more technology in their classrooms in the future, according to Rapp.

“The wave of the future is using tablets, streaming capabilities and things like the stylus pen to directly relate content to students,” he said. “Right in front of my students I can take my pen, emphasize something on a screen and have it stream directly in front of them. The education can unfold right before their eyes.”