The Role of Technology in Large Scale Improvement of Student Learning

The educational world in is a state of change, with an increased emphasis on the implementation of programs and policies designed to create large-scale improvements in student learning and performance. The social changes in the world, with an increasing movement towards the “global village” concept, has brought a new level of competitiveness to education, that was previously absent. Schools, school divisions, and even provinces had compared results in the past, but now the comparisons are on a global level, with Canadian students being surpassed by students in other countries. The emergence of countries like China and India as new economic powers, and their large populations mean that the students being taught in Saskatchewan now will be competing for jobs with a much larger pool of applicants than students in the past. The need for educational reform is driven by other factors as well, but the increasingly competitive nature of large-scale assessments like PISA is a major force for reform in Canada. There are a variety of approaches to initiating the large-scale reform that is necessary to improve student learning, but one of the increasingly popular methods is through the use of technology. Technology is one of the driving forces behind globalization of business, so it stand to reason that in order to prepare our students to compete on a global level, we need to use the technology of the present and future, not of the past. This also means that when we assess the ability of our students to meet the educational goals we set for them, we need to do so in a way that directly relates to the ways in which they are learning.

The idea of improving educational outcomes through technology is not a new one, as computers and the ...

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... we make significant technological changes immediately.

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