Communicative tools

ICT as communicative tool

Communicative tool is an application which allows easy communication between two or more people. In school these communicative tools enables interaction between teacher and the students, among students. Examples: use of emails, we chat, messenger, telegram and all. These tools allow interaction among learners and a teacher despite physical barriers. With the advent of education technology, a wealth of brilliant new tools presents themselves to the educator to stay effectively connected to students at all time and in an exciting different ways. Communicative tools allow students to communicate with each other through emails, chat room, and discussion board to share information effectively. This allows for an extensive community of learners all worthy for specific goal. 

There are two types of communicative tools:

1.      Synchronous

Synchronous tools enable real time communication and collaboration in a “same time- different place” mode. Any learning tools that is in real time such as instant messaging that allows students and teacher to ask and answer questions immediately is   synchronous. Students can interact with other students and their teacher during the lesson rather than learning on their own.  Synchronous communication enables students to avoid feeling of isolation. However synchronous learning is not as flexible in terms of time.

2.  Asynchronous

Asynchronous enable communication and collaboration over a period of time, through a “different –time- different place” mode. Asynchronous communication can be carried out even when the students or teacher is offline.  Asynchronous e-learning includes course work and communications delivered via web, email, and message posted on community forums. Asynchronous tools are useful for sustaining dialogue and collaboration over a period of time and follow the curriculum at their own space without having to worry about scheduling conflict.

Apart from the many communicative tools blogging is one of the convenient tools where students can write blog posts and create digital portfolios under teacher’s supervision. Blogging can give students a real life application to communication.  Ideally for effective teaching and learning it should include both synchronous and asynchronous communication. This allows students and teacher to benefit from the different delivery formats regardless of their schedule or preferred learning methods.

Informative tools

Reflection on ICT as informative tool.

What do we know about the ICT as informative tools?What do we know about the usefulness and appropriateness of informative tools for educational purpose? What are the advantages of using ICT as informative tools?

ICT plays a vital role and contributes to universal access to education, equity in education and the delivery of quality teaching and learning.  Technology has been supported in various ways to teach and learn. It is important to acknowledge that students are already interested and engaged in using technology because it gives amazing opportunities for teacher and students to improve their knowledge retention, encourage individual learning, collaboration and acquire many important skills. The integration of ICT tools such as informative, communicative, constructive, co-constructive and situating tools can take us through the different stage of teaching and learning. For now I will reflect on what an informative tool is and how it helps in effective teaching and learning process.

Informative tools are applications that provide various information in different format such as video, audio, text, internet and graphics. ICT has made our teaching and learning more convenient and effective. And I believe that with the rapid changes in education system demands hands-on-experience and the use of ICT. Learning from different informative tool is much better than learning from normal lecture as we get to explore lots of information from different sources. Through this we are learning effectively, provided with the creative idea to reshape our existing knowledge.   

Among the informative tools internet is one of the most appropriate and most preferred informative tool used in educational purposes. Let me reflect on how internet serves educational purposes. The development of internet technologies has raised the education system. Nowadays students are engaged through e-learning to continue their learning and it has changed the way students are being taught. Internet application responds to student’s question in real –time. As we can see multiple information uploaded on the internet, it helps the learning process as it simplifies the knowledge and visualizes what is being taught. Through the session on informative tools I learned that in order to have effective teaching and learning the teacher needs to provide the information / references/ content for the student in the beginning, during or after the activity. When we use ICT as informative tools we get to learn how to integrate relevant ideas, analyze the information and develop web evaluation skills. 

The informative tools have been crucial in the evaluation of education system in various ways. Hence it should be used for good purposes. It has had a great impact on imparting education to the children. This informative tools make content more enjoyable and leads to higher order thinking skills and students can gain genuine learning experience , collaboratively constructing their own knowledge and applying their learning’s in real-world context.