Teaching with Technology in the Modern Classroom: A Learning Systems Model

Rapid advances in technology, an expanding non-traditional student body, and paradigm shifts are profoundly changing education. \\Tith Federal initiatives targeting ways to help students, educators feel the pressure to do more teaching with technology. However, educators may tend to adapt a piecemeal approach, without recognizing the wider implications for education as a total system. The Learning Systems Model expands and tailors a process model for teaching that identifies the interrelated components of education at the levels of individual, institution, and the wider society. In particular, elements within the model emphasize the needs of a multicultural and diverse student body, as well as the implications of utilizing technology as a tool in education. The discussion ends with specific teaching skills and techniques to help the educator adapt to the modern classroom. Sixth Annual Symposium on Teaching Effectiveness November 4, 1998 150 Teaching with Technology in the Modern Classroom: A Learning Systems Model Teaching with Technology in the Modern Classroom A Learning Systems Model Modem educators face numerous challenges. From outside their institutions, educators must answer to constituencies who demand greater accountability for the time, effort, and money spent on the educational process. Internally, educators must adapt to rapidly changing technology, to an expanding non-traditional student body, and to changing paradigms of the educational process. In reacting to pressure from one or other of these dimensions, educators may react too quickly, reaching for a single cureall as a quick solution. But as a modem proverb has stated, "When you're up to your knees in alligators, it's hard to remember that the original objective was to drain the swamp." The proverb is now dated, of course, written before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency and the preservation of wetlands; however, the proverb does remind us to focus on the