Technology is a game-changer. Educational professionals who choose to resist deploying educational technology will simply be left behind by those who will achieve far superior results. Those who think they can do perfectly well without it will find themselves less and less relevant to their pupils and to the needs of society.

Worldwide there is an ever-growing body of research to support the view that when technology is properly implemented and students engage in meaningful activity, children develop higher-order thinking skills and achieve at higher levels than in the traditional classroom.

Teachers are the key. A revolution is taking place in many classrooms worldwide, led by a small group of early adopters. While children are keen to embrace technology at home, teachers face various barriers in embracing it in the classroom. The deve-lopment of teacher confidence and compet-ence is the single most important factor in the pace and extent to which the benefits of learning technologies are realised.

Developments in cloud computing offer schools significant savings in that digital resources available are easily passed to students and costs are very low. Also, schools that use technology will improve their partnership with parents far beyond one-way communications.

Many schools worldwide are using the one-to-one learning approach, that is, a device for each student. One common reason for going one-to-one is that schools need to reflect the real world outside school, where technology is ubiquitous.

Many one-to-one implementation projects have been guided by providing contemporary learning and empowering students with a learning-with-technology philosophy that emphasises four changes: expanding the walls of the classroom, personalising learning, demonstrating understanding beyond text, and fostering metacognition.

Since computers first arrived in classrooms and labs, educational technology enthusiasts have promoted the technology’s promise to transform learning while sceptics have often stressed that technology is just a tool.

Decades later, schools using technology effectively seem to arrive at a confluence of those two ideas, where skilful use of digital tools is corequisite with the ability to create learning experiences that are relevant and worthwhile for students.

While the route to such a destination is anything but direct and not everyone arrives at the same time, this new learning landscape seems more in reach than ever.

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Information provided by Holistic Institute of Technologies.