How Can You Make Students Learn and Communicate Better by Incorporating Technology?

When technology is incorporated in communications and learning, students get the spark, enjoy it and try their best to cooperate and learn better. Keeping them spirited and moving them forward in class is solely the teacher’s responsibility. So teachers should decide which technologies they should incorporate in class to retain the interest of their students.

Simply ordering your students to bring their TAB or Laptop to classroom won’t help. You must guide them. Tell them to research on a topic by typing keywords in Google. If they need help with keywords, give them an example.

Give them class or home assignments on making videos. They should Google and find out the steps on how to create them. Then, later on, they can create videos for their projects.

Tell them they should send in their report/document assignments as PDF attachments. Mention to them that you do not accept Word attachments in case they contain viruses. You can give a hint on how they can convert word documents to PDF for instance, by using the "Save As PDF” option in Word.

You might have the requirement to write detailed documents or thesis under your supervision. You guide them by mentioning that the Word documents should be divided into chapters with page numbers. You need Roman numerals as page numbers for the first few pages before the chapters begin. You need them to use the built-in “Table of Contents” feature, which has a better format and aesthetic look.

You might want to keep cell phone numbers of team members for your projects and thesis so that you are better able to exchange quick messages in urgent situations. The team members can, in turn, relay the message to other members of their teams. Emails are also a good way to exchange information for your project and thesis teams. However, you can use cell phone numbers only when it is necessary.

Students should be able to decide whether they want to carry laptops or notebooks because the latter is cheaper, smaller and easier to carry. They should know classroom requirements and buy accordingly.

Students should be able to sign up for group discussions and proceed smoothly with them asking questions and also contributing something they know well about the course under discussion. That way everyone in the group discussion benefits and it is a win-win situation.

They should be able to sign up for forums and post the problems they are facing with their programming at the advanced level. Teachers and TAs don’t opt for this kind of help. So it’s better to reach out for forums on the particular programming language/ course.

Traditional books contain more concrete and detailed step by step content which should, therefore, be certainly consulted. Students can become members of the institution’s library and find out online which books are available in the library from the comfort of their home/hostel. They can then book them online accordingly and collect them physically. Although reading eBooks on a particular course is great, no one can undermine the power of reading physical books from a library. If a book is unavailable at the moment, the library can text or email to the particular student when it is available.

All students in all departments should have a basic knowledge of EXCEL and PowerPoint. EXCEL will be needed for calculations on a spreadsheet while PowerPoint, more importantly, for slideshows as presentations.

Another important software the students would need for working with images and editing them is Adobe Photoshop or more simply, Paint. They can copy online images and/or scanned photos and paste, or drag and drop them, in Photoshop or Paint. They can then edit their size, shape, color etc, save them and then insert them in PowerPoint or Word. It is better to save the images in PNG or JPEG format, which is widely recognized.

All along, students should learn good ethics and behave well with lecturers, professors, and their TAs. They should email them using decent language for meetups or any questions they might have.

In conclusion, this article presented a number of ways students could benefit from learning and communications using technology. Starting from using laptops, TABs or Notebooks, they can go online to Google a research topic, join group discussions and forums, reserve library books online and send PDF attachments as assignments to their teachers and also email them decently in case they want an appointment or have any questions.

On the other hand, the students can work offline to create videos, write a lengthy thesis in Word using its built-in features, create spreadsheets in EXCEL for calculations, make slideshows in PowerPoint for presentations and also work on images and edit them using Paint/Photoshop.

All these technologies certainly improve the learning skills of the students and assist them to communicate better with their teachers, making it a win-win for either party.