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The importance of audio visual (AV) technology in education should not be underestimated. There are two reasons for this; one, learning via AV creates a stimulating and interactive environment which is more conducive to learning; two, we live in an audio-visual age which means that having the skills to use AV equipment is integral to future employment prospects. Therefore exposure to AV technology in education is imperative.

AV Technolog

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A cynic would say that technology has done nothing to change education. However, in many ways, technology has profoundly changed education. For one, technology has greatly expanded access to education. In medieval times, books were rare and only an elite few had access to educational opportunities. This book is targeted towards those who are looking for career in educational technology, instructional design, or media and information systems, or may want to continue their studies in graduate programs in learning and instructional technology, and those who are interested in becoming teacher in K-12 setting but need background in educational technology.

The AV technology used in education currently is mainly the interactive whiteboard. More than two million interactive whiteboards are now installed worldwide, and this product continues to show strong growth. It is predicted that one out of every five classrooms worldwide will have an interactive whiteboard by the end of 2013.

Children are exposed from a young age to a range of other AV technologies, which previous generations were not. This includes the television, DVDs, iPods, Nintendo Wiis, computer games and the Internet. Statistics which show the link between children and AV technology include:

• Mobile market trends report that between 2010 and 2012, over 7 million mobile subscribers are aged between 0 and 10
• A further 2 million are aged 11 to 14 years old (BECTA, 2008).
• A report by Mintel in 2011 found that “half of all children aged 7 to 12 visit social networking websites’
• An estimated 0.97 million children, go on Facebook everyday.” (Mintel, 2011)

Therefore it is clear that children of primary school age have the interest and capacity to learn and navigate AV technologies.

The importance of AV technology in education for future career prospects

AV skills are essential in the world of business today. In the current economic climate the government needs to make long term plans to ensure that the skills set of the UK match the evolution of AV. A research report conducted by ‘Prospects’ (a United Kingdom graduate careers company) identified that:

“there are strong signs that the IT industry will continue to grow across a range of industries and IT is the essential component which ensures businesses can run effectively and efficiently.”
The report furthered:

“There will be an increasing need for employees to possess higher level IT skills to cope with the demand for producing more innovative IT products. These skills need to be continually refined if the UK is to remain a significant player in the IT sector in the future.”

This highlights the absolute necessity of the role of the national curriculum to educate children with the AV skills that are necessary to perform the jobs of the future.

AV technology in schools

AV technology has been used in schools for decades, but only in the form of a TV and video player to show short educational films. Now it is the computer that shows these educational films and homework is also being done increasingly on PCs.

Children learn differently and audio visual equipment gives teachers the chance to stimulate each child’s learning process with a combination of pictures, sounds and attention grabbing media. We are surrounded by audio visual equipment and children are keen to understand technology and keep up to date with applied science. Having this opportunity in the classroom helps to facilitate learning.

More and more schools are taking advantage of AV technology to teach their students. This equipment can be used to present information to students but also the fact that they are interacting with AV technology on a daily basis also makes them proficient in using technology.

Not exposing children to different forms of technology is depriving them of vital learning opportunities that could benefit them in later life for example through increased career opportunities. AV lessons should not just consist of children working in pairs on a PowerPoint presentation or rewriting a piece of work using Word, ICT should be challenging, exciting and fun.

Barriers to AV technology

Schools are sometimes reticent to recognise the benefits that technology offers to children who are in contact with them every day. Also, a child’s technological ability often outweighs that of the teacher (Burns, 2012). This creates a clear barrier to using AV in education effectively.

A report written by Becta in 2004 on ‘a review of the research literature on barriers to the uptake of AV by teachers’ evidences many factors to illustrate this gap. For example:

“Resistance to change is a factor which prevents full integration of ICT in the classroom.”
Also:

‘A very significant determinant of teachers’ levels of engagement in ICT is their level of confidence in using the technology. Teachers who have little or no confidence in using computers in their work will try to avoid them altogether.’

Therefore in order to use AV technology successfully in education, these bariers need to be overcome.
Interactive Whiteboards

According to the report ‘Interactive Whiteboards in Education,’ they help in improving learning in education in the following ways:

• They make it easy for teachers to enhance presentation content by easily integrating a wide range of material into a lesson e.g. a picture from the internet, and teacher annotations on these objects.
• They allow teachers to create easily and rapidly customised learning objects from a range of existing content and to adapt it to the needs of the class in real time.
• They allow learners to absorb information more easily.
• They allow learners to participate in group discussions by freeing them from note-taking.
• They allow learners to work collaboratively around a shared task or work area.
• When fully integrated into a VLE (virtual learning environment) and learning object repository there is potential for widespread sharing of resources.
• When used for interactive testing of understanding for the entire class, they can rapidly provide learner feedback.

DVDs

The British Film Institute (BFI) has been working with local authorities to provide schools with packs of seven DVDs containing 55 short films, and has trained primary and secondary teachers to think about film in terms of narrative, structure, editing and sound. They have found, he says, that film can often spark a response in children who otherwise appear uninterested in literacy.
Many teachers who have used the films have found that children who previously said very little, or had poor writing skills, demonstrate a much more sophisticated vocabulary and writing ability than they had previously shown,
A research report by Jackie Marsh of the University of Sheffield and Eve Bearne of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, entitled ‘Moving Literacy On’, says that the BFI project resulted in a measurable improvement in children’s literacy to the extent of improving SAT scores in some local authorities.

iPod Touches

Learning consultant Professor Stephen Heppell ran a project in which he gave 13 and 14 year-old students iPod Touches (MP3 players with screens that allow you to browse the internet) and asked them to complete certain tasks. To his surprise, he found that their search engine of choice was not Google, but YouTube, because it provided them with a clear, visual set of results rather than a series of short paragraphs.

YouTube

YouTube and other similar sites such as TeacherTube and Teachers TV are powerful tools that are freely available to anyone and, offer vast potential for the use of audio-visual materials in education. YouTube has a wealth of educational content – from science experiments (there are 47,000 in all) through to PowerPoint presentations and simple demonstrations of how to play a musical instrument.

Mobile Phones

A recent Becta report by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, ‘How Mobile Phones Help Learning in Secondary Schools’, showed how mobile phones could be used in a variety of imaginative ways, from taking photographs of designs or experiments in Design Technology or science lessons to making a recording of the teacher reading a poem that the student could listen to later.

Some primary schools have successfully used Create-A-Scape, a free learning resource from Futurelab that uses the GPS and camera functions of a handheld device such as a PDA, enabling learners to create learning journeys that are enhanced by audio-visual materials: collections of sounds and images are triggered when the user moves into a particular geographical area.

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The Internet

The internet doesn’t just give students access to a vast range of information, it also enables them to share their work with others. For example an Essex school created podcasts by students which now have 1,000 subscribers. Dan Sutch, a Senior Researcher at Futurelab says:

“Podcasts are a great example of where a fantastic resource, of an expert, such as a teacher, explaining something, can be accessed when the student needs it. It might be in revision, on a reflection of the lesson, or it might be a lesson the child hasn’t physically attended but as it’s been podcast they potentially have access to it.”

In other words, it puts the choice of how to learn in the hands of the learner, by enabling them to learn in their own time, at their own pace and in their chosen way

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The future of AV technology in schools

Audio-visual technologies will play a huge role in the future of schools thanks to the development of technology and the increasing body of evidence which proves its ability to improve learning and future employment prospects. The National Curriculum describes AV as something that:

“Prepares pupils to participate in a rapidly changing world in which work and other activities are increasingly transformed by access to a varied and developing technology.”

A wide selection of AV tools make teaching and learning a rich and enjoyable experience, inspire learners with creative and innovative multimedia activities and will also save time in lesson preparation. The ability to share this information will eventually create a ‘global curriculum’

(Source, Carding – Education Closet View Here)

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Educational technology is a field of study that investigates the process of analyzing, designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating the instructional environment and learning materials in order to improve teaching and learning. It is important to keep in mind that the purpose of educational technology (also referred to as instructional technology) is to improve education. We must define the goals and needs of education first and then we use all our knowledge, including technology, to design the most effective learning environment for students.

Instructional technology can also be seen as a process of solving educational problems and concerns, which might include motivation, discipline, the drop-out rate, school violence, basic skills, critical thinking, and the whole list of educational concerns. First, the problem is identified, an analysis of the factors of the problem is made, and possible solutions to the problem are presented. Then, the student population and the curriculum are analyzed. The next step is to select the most appropriate instructional strategies for the particular situation. Next, instructional materials and resources are selected that are suitable for the curriculum and the mode of instruction chosen. Finally, the program is implemented, evaluated, and revised as needed in order to meet the stated goals for school improvement.

The learning materials today have greatly expanded because of the various technological advances. Instructional materials include more conventional materials, such as the blackboard, overhead projectors, televisions, VCRs, overhead projectors, slide projectors, and opaque projectors, as well as newer materials, such as the computer, various software applications, LCD projectors, camcorders, digital cameras, scanners, the Internet, satellite, interactive TV, audio and video conferencing, artificial intelligence, and so on.

Teachers in the public schools and faculty at universities need to understand what types of materials are available, how to use them, why they should be used, when they should be used, and how to integrate them into the teaching/learning environment in order to meet the ultimate goal of improving education. Teachers also need to seriously consider how these newer materials can affect what and how we learn and teach.

The issue of what these materials are and how to use them is a first step. But we must quickly begin to discuss how these materials should be used and how they affect the curriculum and instruction in our schools. Technology can be used to perpetuate a teacher-led, knowledge-based learning approach or it can be used to help us implement a student-centered, constructivist, and progressive approach. We need to help teachers to understand the bigger picture of how technology can revolutionize education. Just teaching teachers how to use the technology will lead to enhancing a knowledge-level educational system. Teaching them the real potentials of technology will lead to promoting higher-level thinking, independent learning, and life-long learning.

The skills and issues that need to be addressed by teachers are vast. To help in understanding what these skills and issues are, the Coordinator of Educational Technology at UNCA has created a list of items regarding educational technology. These are items that the faculty at the universities need to understand so that they can incorporate them into their own teaching and thus help preservice teachers understand them so that they can more effectively utilize technology in their own teaching as well.

Remember, in all of these areas of educational technology that the goal of improving a specific aspect of teaching and learning comes first. The technology is selected to help us meet these goals.

For more information on Instructional Technology, click here.

Software Tools

Word processing, database, spreadsheet, telecommunications, presentation, authoring, graphic paint programs. Teachers need to know how to use them, how to teach them to students, and how and why to use them in the classroom.

Software Types

Drill and practice, tutorials or computer-based instruction, and simulations. Teachers need to know what these are as well as why, when, and how to incorporate them into their teaching.

Integrated Learning Systems

Also known as computer-managed instruction. Teachers need to know what this is, how to use it, when to use it, with what grade levels and subject areas to use it, with what students to use it, and its role in the educational process.

Equipment Use

Digital camera, scanner, camcorder, CD-writer, computer, modem, printer, VCR, LCD projector, laser-disc player, and others. Teachers need to know how to use them and how they can be used in the classroom.

Multimedia Integration

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Create and find graphics, images, audio files, video files, and animations. Import these multimedia objects into their presentations and learning materials. Understand how and why the integration of multimedia helps them to teach and how it helps students to learn.

Audio and Video Conferencing

Understand what these are and how to incorporate them into the educational process. Understand various teaching methods that best utilize these tools. Understand how these can affect how we learn.

Distance Education Team zwangerall video newsletter issue 1teach to be happy.

Understand what it is, types of instructional delivery systems and media to be used (i.e., self-instructional manuals, slides, satellite, videotaped instruction, interactive TV, and the Internet), how to design courses using distance education, the differences in this type of learning and teaching, techniques for delivering instruction in this method, and why and how this approach can be used at various grade levels.

Classroom Configurations

How to best equip and utilize technology in the classroom. How to use the technology in the classroom. Classrooms need multimedia technology in each classroom. Teachers need access to teaching computers, LCD projectors, scanners, and other equipment in the classroom. Teachers need to be able to quickly use this equipment and access software when needed. Teachers need to be able to access and display the Internet and know how to utilize the Internet, software programs, presentation software, videotapes, and so on, in their teaching methods. Classrooms also need software and equipment available to their students.

Web Board

How to use it, how to set up discussion groups for students, how to post assignments and readings, and how to use it for students to post their assignments. Teachers need to understand how and why this technology can affect their teaching approach.

Web Pages

How to create web pages, how to use them in their teaching, and why they should use them. Web pages can have many functions for displaying information and creating student interaction. Web pages can also be used for helping students be more independent learners.

The Internet

What it is, how to use it, and how to incorporate it into the teaching/learning process. Teachers need to know how to search for information, how to critically analyze and evaluate this information, how to use FTP (file transfer protocol), telnet, email, mailing lists, and newsgroups. Teachers need to know how this powerful system can affect what is learned and how learning can best occur.

Software Review and Evaluation

How to select appropriate software for specific grade levels and content areas, how to evaluate the effectiveness of this software, and what types of software are available. Teachers need to be thoroughly familiar with many of the software options available and understand when and how to use them in the classroom.

Integration of Technology

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Teachers need to understand the three technological configurations available – additive, integrated, and independent. They need to understand which configuration that they would like to implement, why this one is best for them and their students, and how to implement this method of integration. Teachers need to know how, when, and why to use any technology in the classroom. Teachers need to be able to modify how they teach in order to incorporate this technology.

Design and Create Instructional Materials

How to design and create various instructional materials for learners. Teachers need to understand design principles, how to create instructionally effective materials, what types of materials to create to best meet the learner needs, and how they can utilize these materials in their teaching. Instructional materials that teachers need to know how to create range from bulletin boards and transparencies to PowerPoint, HyperStudio, and web-based materials.

Moral, Legal, and Ethical Issues

Teachers need to understand these issues and how they might affect what and how they teach. These issues might be copyright and fair use issues to issues involving access to information. Teachers need to be aware of society’s view on the use of technology and how these issues might affect what they can do in the classroom.

New Software and Hardware

Teachers need to keep up with what types of instructional materials and tools that are being developed and how these new materials might be useful to them as teachers. They need to learn how to use these new materials and how to incorporate them into their teaching.

Philosophical Questions and Issues

What is the role of technology in education? How should technology be used for teaching and learning? When should it be used? What types of learners (learning styles, ages, ability levels, gender, etc.) can best benefit from what types of technology? How does technology affect what and how we teach? How does technology affect our lifestyles and our whole educational system? Should we reconstruct education because of technology? What should the educational system look like in the next few years because of these advancements in technology?