Incorporating technology in your teaching

This competency focuses on the effective selection and integration of digital and physical tools, applications and virtual platforms to promote and enhance students’ learning, engagement, assessment and accessibility. It encompasses staying informed about current technologies, selecting tools that best align with instructional goals, designing lessons that thoughtfully incorporate these technologies and ensuring equitable access to such technologies.

Description

Tech is any tool that is developed to fulfill a particular purpose. Most of the time, the purpose is to help people to complete a particular task. Particularly, technology in teaching are the tools that help us to enhance the learning process of our students. Note that technology is not only digital like computers or projectors, but paper and blackboards are too. Educators can be creative with the resources that are given.

It is worth noticing that generative AI (genAI) has become a transformative, and at times disruptive, technology in modern education. Among the teaching community, numerous efforts are underway to understand both its benefits and its challenges in teaching and learning. Like any other tool, generative AI can be thoughtfully integrated by educators to enhance student learning, provided its limitations are considered.

Some reasons educators could have to use technology in the classroom are:

  • Making the content more attractive and engaging.
  • Illustrating key concepts.
  • Facilitating communication instructor-student and student-student.
  • Connect with resources.
  • Provide a practice of real-life scenarios.
  • Make a task easier.

The first step to even thinking using technology in the classroom is to develop a learning objective that is SMART : Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. Such learning objective can be written using Bloom’s taxonomy of measurable verbs. After having a SMART objective we can choose a technology to work with that will help to achieve the learning objective in our learning context.

Reflection

Along human history, technology has impacted several teaching and learning practices. Side rules have been replaced by calculators, searching books in public libraries have been replaced by google searches, classrooms have become zoom calls and learning from an expert is watching their explanation videos on YouTube. But it should not be surprising. “Technology is, by definition, disruptive. It enables scientific knowledge to support the achievement of practical goals of human life, but, as a byproduct, it also reshapes activities and behaviours, and thus it must be regulated” (Giannakos et al., 2024) . Therefore, as educators and learners, we should embrace new technologies with a thoughtful an ethical approach, integrating them in the teaching and learning process while working to mitigate potential risks.

For that reason, I have learned that the first step in incorporating any technology in the classroom is to establish a SMART learning objective. Once the objective is clearly defined, I can select the tools and resources that will best support both my students and me in achieving it. Equally important is communicating to my students this learning goal and the technology we are using to ensure clarity and engagement. Throughout this process, it is essential to consider the diverse strategies students use solve problems, as well as the specific context of the university and student population.

Building on the recommendations from the workshop Integrating Technology in Teaching I formulated my initial inquiry questions of the research project on studying students' perspectives of the implementation of an AI-tutor for learning college algebra:

  • What is the perception of the use of genAI as a tutor before/after interacting with the program?
  • What are the benefits (if any) of using genAI as a tutor on the learning process of the students? What are the drawbacks, if any?
  • If there are benefits, what is the most effective way to implement this technology?
  • If there are drawbacks, what is the most effective way to mitigate them?
  • For which learning activities the technology meets the learning objective?
  • How do I know/asses that this technology will accomplish the learning objective? Qualitatively? Quantitatively?
  • What variables of the learning environment can affect my results?

Artifacts & materials

Here you can find the slides of the Integrating Technology in Teaching workshop. Note that most of the slides are focused on stablishing a SMART learning objective.