Vision of a Techno-Constructivist

The overriding goal of educational technology is that through firsthand interaction, collaboration, and subsequent reflection true learning takes place for all learners. Educational technology today has made it possible to realize the potential of constructivist teaching and learning in ways that were unimaginable only a decade ago. Through connectivity, the availability of information, and the emerging equity of access students are increasingly in the driver's seat of their learning. The goal of educational technology should be the realization of an equitable learning environment where teachers act as facilitators while students construct their knowledge through exploration, questioning, and analyzing what we know. In the ongoing dialogue on public education, teachers have no greater tool of empowerment and efficacy than technology used constructively with students. (McKenzie, 2000)

The learning process is undertaken when we encounter something new and seek to reconcile it with previous ideas or experiences. As we do this we must decide to integrate this new data or discard it as irrelevant. This is what constructivist learning is. Constructivism drives educational technology because it allows in ways never before possible for students to become the active creators of their knowledge. By enabling personalization of learning opportunities as well as nearly unlimited opportunities for collaboration, both within the classroom and all over the world, students are no longer bound to a teacher as a gatekeeper of learning. This opens up so many possibilities for both the teacher and the student to facilitate authentic learning experiences. Students learn when they have an authentic audience for expressing their learning rather than see their work pile up on a teacher’s desk. Applications such as FlipGrid, YouTube, and countless others allow students to showcase their learning and receive authentic feedback to increase the depth and meaning of their learning. A teacher empowered by technology now has the resources to place an emphasis on students understanding their own learning process. More than anything else modern teachers are willing to allow their students to completely immerse themselves in the opportunities of technology. They allow their students to see the connections they can make using electronic mail, Web sites, multi-user environments, databases, spreadsheets, publishers, word processors, and more, and they support them and help them successfully complete their tasks. (McKenzie 2000) This has an exponentially greater outcome than analog learning environments in which the teacher is responsible for imparting the “right answers” thereby making students a third party to their own learning. Technology empowers constructivist teachers to create lifelong learners instead of vessels of predetermined information.

Key issues that technology addresses in the teaching-learning environment are autonomy, participation, and equity. Students need autonomy and the elimination of outdated teaching practices to achieve the skills they will need to be successful in 21st-century life. Optimal student-centered learning operates on collaboration, project-based learning, technology integration, and plenty of conversation between students and teachers about learning itself. Participatory learning is built on mutual respect and a quest for knowledge, not on a central authority structure or point collecting. Educational technology provides the tools we need to realize a learning model not based on the Carnegie system of education modeled after the industrial revolution, but one based on the world our students live in today. A modern classroom is an informal setting where students are free to explore and learn using technology to research, collaborate, and solve problems. They pursue relevant and timely topics with the teacher facilitating both a wide breadth of content knowledge context and a deep synthesis of implications. Educators must recognize that if students are investigating and asking questions, writing about what they're learning, and doing those things in an authentic context, then they are learning to read and write and think. (Schrum, 2005) The primary guiding principle for today's educators should be the involvement of students in authentic activities that are situated in strong, life-like context, that encourage construction of adaptive knowledge, and that make those students good thinkers and problem solvers today and tomorrow.

Further information on Technology and Constructivism

Are You a Techno-Constructivist?

Technology as a Tool to Support Instruction

The Impact of Technology on Constructivist Pedagogies

Constructivism and Technology: Strategies for Increasing Student Learning Outcomes