Technology is crucial in personalized learning by providing learners with customized learning experiences tailored to their needs, interests, and learning styles. Personalized learning leverages technology to create a more student-centered approach to education. This approach provides learners with more flexibility and autonomy over their learning process.
It’s important to note that personalized learning isn’t a strategy that has been implemented due to the technology available. In 1884, a self-paced plan for students to complete lessons was implemented in Pueblo, Colorado, and, as a philosophy, personalized learning has simmered gently on the back-burner ever since.
Today’s technology has merely added the fuel personalized learning needed to move into the mainstream. It is now a scalable education strategy rather than something to be considered to aid particular individuals under certain circumstances. While checking out schools for class 7 admission, finding out if any scholarships are available would be a good idea.
The Role Of Data
Technology has solved one of the most significant challenges of personalizing the learning experience. If students are all learning in different ways—perhaps doing completely different tasks than their peers—then tracking their performance and their growth can be challenging. Multiply that by hundreds of students, and the size of the challenge becomes apparent.
Technology has provided data on students’ performance and preferred learning styles. It has also given students greater visibility over their progress than they have ever had before.
Adaptive Learning Solutions
With access to the right technology, students can learn at their own pace and level. In some cases, students can build their learning playlist—in much the same way as they might construct one in Spotify. This functionality supports flexibility and individuality, leading to greater engagement and, hopefully, better learning outcomes.
Offering Additional Assistance
There has always been a need to provide additional support to certain students, and, unfortunately, that has become more common in the face of a global pandemic. Thus, the need for a school scholarship and allied assistance helps enhance students’ capabilities. Technology is helping to drive the effort to close the gap between lower-attaining students and their counterparts.
Enhancing the Role of Teachers
With talk of customized lesson plans and the development of ‘playlists’ to work through, it would be easy to think of technology as something to replace a human educator. But that’s far from the case.
The right technology can enable the delivery of content in the most appropriate form for each individual, enhancing the teacher’s role. Rather than being at the front of the class talking through the subject matter, the teacher can spend time supporting students in their learning.
Collaborative Approach
Personalized learning is all about collaboration between the student and teacher. They work together to determine and design a learning plan. Technology certainly has a role to play in enabling this. Its job is to help students to articulate what they need and support educators in developing the right approach for each individual. From there, it allows both to keep track of progress.
Scalable Personalization
Technology’s most significant impact on personalization is the ability to use it as a strategy at scale. Technology has made creating individual lesson plans and tracking performance much more straightforward. Without it, teachers would quickly lose track of what each individual was supposed to be doing, and the approach would fail.
Giving Students Flexibility
Technology has helped teachers work with students to develop and enact learning pathways. Still, it has also given students much more flexibility in presenting their work. Students have preferred media that they like to use; forcing someone who doesn’t enjoy working with particular software to use it can be disengaging. On the other hand, giving them the choice of using whatever programs they want can be positively liberating.
Overall, technology can help to create a more student-centred approach to education, allowing learners to take control of their learning experience and progress at their own pace while receiving support and feedback from technology-enabled tools and resources.