Educative IT

Technologies of information and of communication (TIC)

Today´s society faces an enormous challenge to improve the quality of life, education and culture. The technological scientific development undergoes a rate of growth without precedents and that in a few years the volume of knowledge of man will change substantially.

The TIC gather together a set of systems that are necessary to administrate the information, especially the necessary computers and programs to transform it, store it, administer it, to transmit it and to find it. The first steps towards a society of information go back to the invention of the electrical telegraph, passing later through the telephone, radiotelephony and, finally, television. Internet, telecommunications and the GPS can be considered as the new technologies for information and communication.

The technological revolution that’s among humanity today is mainly because of the significant advances in technology, information and communication. The great changes that characterize this new society are: the generalization of the use of technologies, communications networks, fast technological and scientific developments and the globalization of the information.

TIC in Education

The new technologies of Information and Communication are those IT tools that process, store, synthesize, recover and display actual information represented in the most varied way (Sanchez, 2000a, 2000b). It is a set of tools, supports and channels for treatment and access to the information. They constitute new supports and channels to give form, register, and store and spread informational contents. Some examples of these technologies are the digital slate (personal computer + multimedia projector), blogs, and by all means, the Web and wikis.

For all type of educative applications, the TIC´s are average. That means that they are tools and construction equipments that facilitate the learning process, the development of abilities and different ways to learn, styles and rhythms for the apprentices. In the same way, technology is used to approach the apprentice to the world, like the world to the apprentice.

For that reason it´s necessary to educate the future generations to be on the same level as the advanced technology, this can be done by incorporating in the education the use of technology and with it the proper use of the computer.

The TIC´s represent a double challenge for education; on one hand they are a powerful tool to introduce to the world of youth, to carry out management, and to improve the profit of their objectives. On the other hand, it sets a challenge in the contents, because we must teach the teenagers to be capable and informed users, who take advantage of the enormous learning resources, change and creativity that these technologies represent. Achieving the first challenge would improve the effectiveness of education, achieving the second challenge would make our country more competitive.

For this the professors must be up-to-date and understand about the advantages that the incorporation of educative Computer science brings to the classrooms.

The advantages of Educational IT

The main advantages of Educational IT are:

• The interaction that takes place between the computer and the student. The computer allows the student to participate actively in the learning process.

• The possibility of giving an individual attention to the student. Starting off that each student has their own rate of learning and previous experiences, the computer will facilitate the problem of these individual differences when they learn, because as soon as the student enters the formulated question into the computer, it is analyzed, which makes the decisions that are based on previous and immediate answers.

• The potentiality to amplify the experiences every day. The computer can create experiences in order to enrich a formal, present and future learning environment with the intention to construct in the students a mental process that can be used for future abstract learning.

• The contribution of the computer as an intellectual tool. The computer becomes a powerful tool with which the student can think and learn creatively, stimulating the development of mental structures, logics and Arithmetic in the students.

• The capacity that it grants the student to control his own rate of learning. One of the advantages of the application of the computer in education is the possibility of adapting to different rates, accepting students with different experiences; this allows the educational process to be more flexible, effective and efficient.

• The control the learning time and sequence. It’s the ability of the student to be able to control his movements through the learning material, being controlling the sequence of the material within a learning sequence and the time of presentation.

• The capacity that grants the student the control of the learning content. The computer can provide a great variety of experiences of interactive learning, allowing a major flexibility to the process, controlling the types of frequency and displaying different routes for a single material.

• The possibility that the computer offers to use the evaluation as a learning mean. This evaluation is based on the learning for the control, that is nothing more than the possibility that the students have to learn the same things; allowing that by the computer they reinforce immediately the correct answers, besides making an auxiliary development of the question; on the contrary if the answer incorrect not only is it identified, but it is also possible to determine why the answer is incorrect and to offer immediate learning sequences to the student. Sanchez J. (1995)