Beyond the Basics — How EdTech Can Provide Students with Essential 21st-Century Skills

With all of the changes and challenges over the previous year, one thing that has stuck with all of us is how important education technology has become to learning—and how rapidly this transition has occurred.

EdTech has the potential to expand student opportunities and improve the way educators teach. When COVID-19 rolled around, EdTech shifted from being a learning supplement to being the focal point of the classroom virtually overnight. As a result of the pandemic's stress, the quick transition to remote and hybrid instruction was the necessity of time. EdTech made learning feasible when physical classrooms were no longer available, and the problem of managing students' social-emotional development made teaching exceedingly challenging for the educators around the globe. Pakistan was no exception to it. With the challenges like connectivity issues, reaching out to marginalized community made it more difficult for the educators to keep the students engaged.

Both obstacles and possibilities arose as a result of the shift. Technology cannot solve every problem, and not every student had access to the right tools or Wi-Fi at home.

Now that education is entering a new phase, there is a lot of concern in the community about what to focus in EdTech practices during and after the pandemic. Many education leaders shared their experience regarding the learning tools to use and suggest rules of teaching with EdTech.

The New Digital Classroom's Three Rules:

Because higher-order thinking abilities are critical for success, we should employ educational technology to promote them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a huge impact on education. The learning process includes memorization and other lower-order thinking skills (Remembering, Understanding, and Applying). AI can do these simple tasks better, faster, and for less money. Schools must devote much more attention to teaching higher-level thinking abilities that cannot be automated, such as creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication, in order to prepare students for the changing employment market.

Allow students to take charge of their own learning and use educational technology to demonstrate their thinking in new ways.

It might be difficult to keep students engaged in a digital environment. When asked from the education leaders, how they advised promoting engagement with technology, a lot of their recommendations came down to one simple principle: put the students in charge.

Although “student organizing themselves” in learning is not a new concept, the opportunities for students to demonstrate their thinking and control their own learning have grown and altered as new technology have opened up new initiatives and possibilities. Educators empower students to completely express themselves using new media and approaches that students today find most familiar and relevant to their life by assigning digital projects such as podcasts, infographics, and video essays. Students become better-informed and more deliberate media consumers when they have the option to develop their own digital media. Students have more control over the direction and vision of their projects with these assignments.

Pedagogy comes first, followed by EdTech—don't let the tool get in the way of learning.

While COVID-19 has changed some of the norms of EdTech, there is one rule that will always be true: excellent pedagogy and educational practices are enduring and timeless.

Thousands of free courses and instructional resources are available on the Adobe Education Exchange to assist teachers learn how to use Adobe products, how to teach with them, and how to incorporate them into any subject, from English to photography. In this manner, Teachers may concentrate on teaching while knowing that the tools are helping students learn more effectively.