An Effective use of ICT for Educational and Learning:

ICT as a Change Agent for Education

Agustina Ayu Safitri

2201412142

Department of Education, Univerrsity of Semarang

nana.ayu17@gmail.com

 Introduction

The field of education has been affected by ICTs, which have undoubtedly affected teaching, learning, and research (Yusuf, 2005). The use of ICT in education, including language teaching and learning is a positive response to the development of the information and communication technology in the third millennium. Moreover, the use of ICT for educational and learning is a necessity, not only to improve the effectiveness and quality of education, but more importantly to enhance the ICT literacy for student and teacher as their life skill in the era of rapidly changing and progressing technology (Hartoyo, 2009). ICTs have the potential to innovate, accelerate, enrich, and deepen skills, to motivate and engage students, to help relate school experience to work practices, create economic viability for tomorrow's workers, as well as strengthening teaching and helping schools change (Davis and Tearle, 1999; Lemke and Coughlin, 1998; cited by Yusuf, 2005). Computers and applications of technology became more pervasive in society which led to a concern about the need for computing skills in everyday life. Hepp, Hinostroza, Laval and Rehbein (2004) claim in their paper “Technology in Schools: Education, ICT and the Knowledge Society” that ICTs have been utilized in education ever since their inception, but they have not always been massively present. Although at that time computers have not been fully integrated in the learning of traditional subject matter, the commonly accepted rhetoric that education systems would need to prepare citizens for lifelong learning in an information society boosted interest in ICTs (Pelgrum, W.J., Law, N., 2003).

Any discussion about the use of computer systems in schools is built upon an understanding of the link between schools, learning and computer technology. However, the use of information and communication technologies in the educative process has been divided into two broad categories: ICTs for Education and ICTs in Education. ICTs for education refers to the development of information and communications technology specifically for teaching/learning purposes, while the ICTs in education involves the adoption of general components of information and communication technologies in the teaching learning process.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning is a term increasingly used to describe the way e-learning is being combined with traditional classroom methods and independent study to create a new, hybrid teachingmethodology. It represents a much greater change in basic technique than simply adding computers to classrooms; it represents, in many cases, a fundamental change in the way teachers and students approach the learning experience. It has already produced an offshoot – the flipped classroom – that has quickly become a distinct approach of its own.

No single, reliable definition of blended learning exists, or even a universal agreement on the term itself. Many use terms like hybrid, mixed, orintegrative to describe the same trend. But the trend is significant. In 2000 an estimated 45,000 K-12 students took an online course, but almost a decade later more than 3 million took courses that way, many of them using computers in the schools themselves.

What is ICT in Education and Why is it Important?

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) education is basically our society’s efforts to teach its current and emerging citizens valuable knowledge and skills around computing and communications devices, software that operates them, applications that run on them and systems that are built with them. 

What are these things? How do they work? How do you use them productively? How are they deployed, assembled, managed and maintained to create productive systems? How they are used in specific business and industry settings? What are the underlying science and technologies behind them and how might those be developed to advance ICT fields?

ICT is complex and quickly changing, and it is confusing for many people. It is so pervasive in the modern world that everyone has some understanding of it, but those understandings are often wildly divergent.