Lesson 3: Roles of Educational Technology in Learning

                                      “Technology makes the world a new place.”

Roles of Technology in Learning

• As tools support knowledge construction: for representing learners’ ideas, understandings and beliefs for producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by learners.
• Information vehicles for exploring knowledge to support learning-by-constructing: for accessing needed information for comparing perspectives, beliefs and world views
• As context to support learning-by-doing: for representing and simulating meaningful real-world problems, situations and context, for representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments and stories of others, for defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking.
• As a social medium to support learning by conversing: for collaboration with others, for discussing, arguing and building consensus among members of a community, for supporting discourse among knowledge-building communities.
• As intellectual partner to support learning-by-reflecting: for helping learners to articulate and represent what they know; for reflecting on what they have learned and how they come to know it; for supporting learners internal negotiations and meaning making.