Children born in the 21st Century are digital natives, to them using the Internet is as easy as breathing. They don’t need help, training or instructions when it comes to using mobile phones, tablets or digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. Technology powers their world.
Educating in school without technology is like teaching children to use stones to light fires when they use self-igniting gas cookers at home! The average Nigerian child regularly uses digital technology and internet connected devices like mobile phones and iPad at home. Exposure to visually interactive, fun and intuitive content makes it more difficult for such kids to engage with traditional methods in school.
This puts school administrators and education stakeholders in a bind:
How do they address the increasing role of technology in education?
How do they cope with this additional cost required to optimize the classroom to use today’s modern technology?
Can they really afford not to upgrade their classrooms with technology?
Technology is a powerful tool that enables learning to be limited by only one thing – imagination.
When it comes to learning, technology is a very powerful tool. The only thing that limits a learning encounter is imagination and creativity. Technology used in the right way accelerates children’s ability to assimilate, retain and apply knowledge. It also provides easier and more effective ways for teachers to deliver lessons.
The benefits of technology include:
- Students can access digital resources that are more current and compelling, with visual and audio support
2. Students can understand and visualise complex and abstract concepts (e.g visit places in the classroom, go back in time, etc)
3. Students are more engaged in class: they are more excited to use technology, participate actively because it is their culture/dialect.
4.With technology, teachers can get fast feedback on students’ work by having access to quick sites, softwares that provide questions/answers linked to topic taught in real time.
5. Technology helps to save time in designing teaching materials and learning plans, additionally overtime materials used over a period can be reused and tweaked to meet the need of current students saving huge amount of time for planning and hunting for resources
6.It also helps prepare Students for a real-world environment.
Schools around the world ranked outstanding understand the importance of merging teaching with technology to deliver the best teaching standard to their children therefore giving their children a leg up in their future career paths. These schools have jumped on the technology bandwagon and made significant investment in technology – from purchase of computers, to interactive whiteboards, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programs and access to the internet
However, despite the investment a lot of teachers are not optimising the use of technology in the classroom. Interactive whiteboards (IWB) are being used just for presentations. Studies reveal that the majority of teachers use the IWB as an overhead projector and for internet research but do not make use of the many other advantageous features of the IWB.
It’s important to remember that the objective of technology is NOT to buy the equipment (computers, ipads and IWB) but to provide lesson plans, curriculum, engaging and appealing interactive displays, presentations, videos, media files and online activities such as worksheets, games and other digital resources.
9ijakid.com works with schools to turn their hardware equipment into learning tools. 9ijakids is an edutech company that develops fun and engaging e-learning broad-based games that can be used in classrooms as full teaching materials or to support other teaching materials on interactive whiteboards and projectors or even on student’s tablets and computers.
9ijakids games helps to reinforce learning by making topics such as Values, Nigeria, Science, Maths, Geography, Music, Entrepreneurship, Bible etc. visually appealing and interactive using games.
To learn more about and play theses educational games visit 9ijakids.com or download the 9ijakids app from App Store and Google Play Store. Simply subscribe to start playing.
