Balancing Technology and Traditional Learning in Schools

A growing significance of technology in education has been recorded, particularly at the beginning of the 21st century, given the fact that technology became a part of people’s lives and nearly in every step of social life. Advancement in technology, however, poses the schools with a difficult question of whether to embrace the new techniques or put the technology into their schools. The goal is to seek to incorporate the advantages of both systems to be able to establish a workable combination of learning systems.

Benefits of Using Technology in Schools

1. Improved Educational Possibilities

• By using technology in teaching, the instructor can get or pass on information that may not be contained in the textbooks. Students are able to get information through social sites, educational sites, videos, and e-books, hence improving their understanding of various lessons.

• Using virtual reality, field trips or simulations, and interactive lessons may help students grasp concepts that, on the other hand, would not be easy to demonstrate in normal classroom settings.

2. Individualized Education

• Education technology is used to help group students for differential learning. Students can find course content at their own comfort, review what they have found difficult, or follow up on a subject of interest in a number of tutorials, applications, or online environments.

• Use of adaptive learning results in the modification of content depending on the failed or passed scores, enabling every learner to be taken through information that he or she is unable to comprehend fully in a classroom setting, thus enhancing learning.

3. Enhanced Cooperation

• Technologies allow the students to work together as a team even without actual physical presence with one another. Apps like Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams and the like enable students to submit assignments, to put up announcements, and to engage in and collaborate on projects within student groups both in and out of school.

• Technology tools foster important interpersonal communication and interpersonal skills, experience, and talents required in every organization in the modern workplace.

4. Effective Instruction and Learning

• Technology helps teachers spend less time on clerical work such as grading papers, monitoring student’s progress, and managing teaching aids within the classroom.

• The teachers are able to upload assignments, view students’ activity, and instantly react to those updates.

5. Getting into International Learning Communities

• The use of the internet leads to student connectivity to other learning communities in the world, hence affording them a chance to interact with other students, professionals and other resources accessible in the world markets.

• Students can join various forums and chat, read or listen to specialized academic material, or even work on group projects.

Benefits of Traditional Learning Methods

1. Good Relationships Between Teachers and Students

• This model of learning focuses on direct communication between the learners and the teachers, and this allows the development of good rapport between them. As opposed to other communication media, direct communication entails quick response, removal of confusion, and individual consideration.

• Students get comfort in caregivers, which teachers are, who are sometimes physically present and not easily replicated through technology.

2. An organized setting for learning

• The organizational structure of the traditional classrooms provides the balance and routine needed by most students with few incidences of distraction or disorganization.

• Classroom environment retains orderliness; students have to attend classes and engage in or follow instructions during lessons, thus reducing incidences of distractions from their own gadgets.

3. Growth of Social and Critical Thinking Skills

• These activities enable the students to achieve critical thinking skills and problem-solving strategies, including debates and face-to-face interactions in groups.

• These settings enable the child to acquire social relationships, emotional growth and teamwork, which are essential in the development of the student.

4. Practical Education

• Physical touching is usually experienced in normal learning processes like handling objects in experiments, going on field trips, and handling material for artwork. They give engaging activities that cause the senses where technology cannot always produce.

• It is known that practical activities improve students’ practical skills of application of the studied material and contribute to knowledge fixation.

Challenges of Technology in Education

1. An excessive dependence on technology

• As much as technology is useful, the overuse of it can only harm students in the long run by not developing aspects of the brain that are important, like critical thinking, face-to-face communication and complex problem solving.

• While using technology, students might completely rely on the answer or the tool to complete the task rather than developing their solution-finding capacity or means.

2. Misuse and Distractions

• As we know, mobile gadgets like smart phones and laptops are some of the common reasons that cause leave-taking in the class. Students, especially teenagers, may find the devices useful for other activities besides learning, such as Facebook, Twitter, playing games and others during lessons.

• Although adopting technology can be useful for learning, notifications or multitasking detract attention from coming lessons.

3. The Digital Gap

• Not all students can be privileged to the kind of technology that is in existence today. Restrictions to owning gadgets, educational software, and credible internet connections also cause differences in educational experience.

• Implementing ICT in schools in areas of low economic status may prove difficult due to a lack of adequate technology resources among the students, meaning an increase in the technology gap between the rich and the poor students.

Challenges of Traditional Learning Methods

1. Restricted Information Access

• Traditional learning still involves the use of textbooks and other hard materials, and this limits the variety of contents and the up-to-date contents that are offered.

• Of course textbooks are still useful, but they can hardly be compared with the flow of the information that is already out on the Internet, which is updated as we speak.

2. Insufficient Involvement of Digital Natives

• Contemporary students are known as the digital generation that is familiar with working at a fast pace and utilizing such tools as interactive technologies. They may not be able to concentrate for long hours in the conventional one-teacher-and-many-students learning culture of lectures.

• It will just make students’ point of view to be more passive and less interested in going through the conventional methods of teaching and learning.

3. Minimal Customization

• It has also been much criticised due to its effectiveness in delivering knowledge by following the traditional method that doesn’t take into consideration the learning and intelligence capability of learners. The slow learners are bound to lag behind, whereas the sharp learners are bound to find the lessons very monotonous.

• For one, there is little flexibility in learning and teaching at the pace that such individual students may desire except where the teacher provides extra attention, which is hard in large class settings.

Strategies for Balancing Technology and Traditional learning

1. The Blended Learning Method

• A blended learning model is one that has both paper and computers as the tools used in learning. For instance, teachers can engage learners through technology in the middle of quizzes, chats, etc., but learners retain face-to-face communication and practical activities.

2. Professional Development and Training for Teachers

• For technology integration in schools, it is necessary that the teachers are trained in the use of technologically integrated tools and general classroom management.

3. Clearly defining Technology Use Boundaries

• This means institutions should provide recommendations of how a classroom should use technologies in that students should just not be a target market for gadgets.

• To avoid distractions, teachers can set some rules concerning the devices and time usage limitations.

Conclusion

Replacing the conventional scenario of education with the usage of technology in schools should be done after thinking a lot. Each of them has its advantages and disadvantages, and the given sources illustrate this statement too. In enhancing integrative use of technology in the teaching learning environment, it is important that schools adopt a meaningful embrace of teaching methods while not dismissing the traditional forms of learning. 

The right balance of technology in learning has to be maintained by some of the best international schools in Kerala. The advancement offered is great and DiYES International aims to follow all. As one of the top international schools in Trivandrum, the right leverage of technology is the smartest move DiYES International took. 

Students are given tech knowledge by teachers having updated knowledge of tech. With this parameter in mind, DiYES is creating an eco-system that balances technology and traditional schooling.