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With the expansion of COVID-19, we are all experimenting with new ways of managing our day to day. We are adapting in many aspects of our lives, whether by working from home, reducing the frequency of weekly food purchases or adapting our sports routine at home.
Within this new organization of our daily lives, one of the sectors that has been most affected by the pandemic is education, due to worldwide school closures.
Whether they are ministers, principals, teachers or even families, everyone has been searching for the best alternatives to keep the educational process going, and in that search, educational technological resources have been the best response.
Educational technology and its benefits
Difficulties and times of great instability often give way to innovations or new ways of seeing things. In this case, we are seeing that educational technologies can be of great help, presenting numerous benefits for learning that we will summarize below.
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Maintaining motivation
Motivation in learning is of crucial importance since it is a key element to foster long-term learning. Indeed, waking up students’ curiosity fuels their desire to know more and keeps them focused on their learning process. In this context, digital education tools offer great support, since they provide interactive materials on various topics adapting to different interests, as well as on a variety of formats (written, video, podcast, etc.) to provide different and personalized resources that respond to a wide range of needs and learning methods.
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Promoting collaboration
In addition, educational technology resources allow highly interactive learning that encourages collaboration between students. Many of these learning solutions offer opportunities for group projects as well as communication functionalities within the platforms, fostering cooperation not only among students but also with teachers.
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Developing of autonomy
It is also important that students can take an active part in their learning process, but for that, it is necessary to rely on elements that ease this involvement. In this area, educational technology solutions can serve as an effective complement to traditional materials, since, through previously constructed learning plans and paths, students can manage and organize their own training even outside the classroom if they wish to.
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Exercising critical thinking skills
Digital education tools and technology, in general, allow us to gather near-infinite information that covers innumerable topics, sources, languages, etc in a single access point. Having a single tool available gathering such varied and valuable information is also a means for students to learn to use said information, to analyze it, to draw conclusions from what has been read, and to discuss and debate it. In this way, they work on developing their critical thinking and analytical skills.
As we have seen, the use of educational technology can bring numerous benefits to the learning process. Although this pandemic has pushed us to rely on these solutions in an unusual way, it is also helping us to realize the need to further contemplate the possibility of much broader use of technology in the educational sector.
Do you want to keep providing your students with the best learning tools in spite of school closures? ODILO, one of the leading companies in digital education with a presence in 40 countries, has opened all its educational technology free of charge to all centers affected by school closings, whether or not they are clients of the company.
Find out more about this initiative here: https://www.odilo.us/covid-19-help/