Eduardo Angel Visuals

The Power of Technology in Education.

Last week, I watched a repeat of a story from 2011, on how the iPad is unlock­ing the minds of peo­ple with Autism. We encour­age every­one to watch it on Youtube here.

It is incred­i­ble to see how the iPad and other smart devices are being inte­grated into class­rooms all over the U.S. to use as new learn­ing tools. Inter­ac­tive appli­ca­tions such as smart boards, cloud com­put­ing and e-learning are now being imple­mented so that stu­dents of all ages can obtain degrees; which is fantastic.

Stu­dents are also now equipped with per­sonal lap­tops, smart phones and tablets. Attain­ing infor­ma­tion and shar­ing knowl­edge has never been eas­ier or more fun.

How­ever, the ben­e­fit of these devices will bring no guar­an­tee to fix­ing our seri­ously bro­ken edu­ca­tion sys­tem.

Smart apps and devices are being used in tremen­dous ways that help stu­dents inter­act and build social com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills (I am not talk­ing about Face­book or Twitter).

At the same time, while a lot of stu­dents are reap­ing the ben­e­fits, oth­ers are not.

Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions are still not avail­able to every­one unfor­tu­nately. While the cost of new tech­nol­ogy is decreas­ing every day, schools in poor neigh­bor­hoods get about half as much money per stu­dent than schools in afflu­ent neigh­bor­hoods; school bud­gets are tied to prop­erty taxes.

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Cor­po­ra­tions such as Teach for Amer­ica are cur­rently involved in a big way with this fact and are look­ing to improve the future of edu­ca­tion for under­priv­i­leged stu­dents across the world.

Wendy Kopp is CEO and cofounder of Teach For All, and Teach for Amer­ica, that focus on ensur­ing edu­ca­tional excel­lence and equity. Check out the keynote speech by Wendy Kopp and how Teach for All is look­ing to improve edu­ca­tion around the world with new tech­nol­ogy and grow­ing leadership.

But are these new inno­v­a­tive tools the key to success?

We have to take into account that every stu­dent has indi­vid­ual learn­ing pat­terns, needs and goals.  With new soft­ware and hard­ware con­stantly chang­ing and improv­ing at a rapid rate, stu­dents should be learn­ing smart devices and appli­ca­tions prop­erly to opti­mize read­ing, solv­ing prob­lems and man­ag­ing daily tasks.