Technology is Your Tool

Use the Computer as a Tool

Tool is defined as a device or instrument used to carry out a particular function. Time to explore how technology can be useful with your students.

Are you old enough to remember the move from VCRs to DVDs to streaming services? The ability to store and watch movies at your convenience was accomplished at first with the VCR and now with streaming services. But think about this: When you push or click, are you actively learning? Consider what the student brain is required to do with the technology in use in the classroom. Is the brain calibrating or measuring? Is the brain organizing or ordering? Is the brain creating something new from nothing at all? Just because a computer is in use, that does not equate to a good use of technology.

The Science I Explored

As the brain perceives the result of the action made by the body, it either reinforces the brain’s existing neural networks of understanding about how the world works or begins to create new ones.

The perception-action cycle is this continuous flow of information and action between the brain and the world around it. On and on it goes: sense, predict, act, adjust. Sense, predict, act, adjust.

…The perception-action cycle is also critical to learning with visual and symbolic representations of actions. Research shows that using mental pictures to imagine how a 3D object looks when rotated, or using motions to simulate new vocabulary words, engages the perception-action cycle and improves student learning.

In fact, scientists have found that even small movements like pointing to numbers in an equation — or interactive touchscreens like iPads — provide opportunities to invoke the perception-action cycle that results in deeper learning.[1] 

A Situation

An educator has access, for the first time in his career, to a computer for each student. Each student will have a laptop provided by the school district. This educator has a directive to use a certain reading program for the students but also the freedom to use other programs to enhance learning.

Using the Computer as a Tool

In order to use the computer as a tool, we must look at results directly connected to our decided-on movements.  Think of the computer as an interactive opportunity. If the children are only reading or listening to a story, and the use of the computer ends there, they are not ‘acting’ and therefore missing an opportunity to use a powerful tool. If there is a math problem that students solve on paper with a formula and input the answer into the program, they have only used the computer like a worksheet.

Think: What can my students create using this tool? What can my students do that would be considered interactive learning? Can data the students have gathered be put into a table or chart? What programs show 3D interactive models of how multiplication works or how the three branches of government come together to govern.

Is the computer only acting like a book where you hear a story or a worksheet where an answer is entered? The educator must take computer usage steps further to discover opportunities for interactive learning, where the student’s brain will calculate, create, and so on.

Do you see your students moving their fingers across the screen, clicking, and moving the mouse in order to manipulate and create? Say it with me: “We’re really using the computer as a tool for learning.”

Quotes

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

—John F. Kennedy

Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand.

—Issey Miyake

[1] Christine Byrd, “What the Perception-Action Cycle Tells Us About How the Brain Learns,” Mind Research Institute, Accessed December 20, 2020, https://blog.mindresearch.org/blog/perception-action-cycle.