By Marwa Kotb
No doubt technology can give fundamental support, it expands course offerings 24/7, provides valuable learning resources for educators to use to update their courses in less time and effort than making their own, asking students to post results on their blogs or write articles on Wikipedia, making presentations using Prezi, using Polling and Smartphones helped me to increases students engagement and motivation, using discussion boards and social media has shown positive results and accelerated learning, a lot of authentic activities and assessments can be easily implemented online or using smart phone apps, it is automatically graded and an analyzed, reports can be used by educators for feedback, something I used to take time doing in excel sheets now it’s takes a mouse click to obtain. Though but I find it challenging to select the best technology tools while not losing sight of the goals for student learning.

The Online Learning Consortium predicts the usage of technology will continue to increase (Buemi, 2015, October 2), so as educators’ eagerness to stay updated with the latest, educators will continue to attend workshops, read articles or research papers, and get all support possible to learn new list of educational technology tools. But I am afraid that we forget a key point, technology is just an aiding tool to enhance but can’t provide all teaching skills required, so while we are investing time and effort to utilize technology we shouldn’t forget to spend more time to enhance our teaching as well. New tools are out every day, we should always remember it isn’t just about the availability, variety or the latest it’s about knowing how to successfully incorporate these tools into teaching, so we should always select what best suits the learning outcome .
References
Buemi, S. (2015, October 2). Taking the Tech Out of Technology. FACULTY FOCUS. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/taking-the-tech-out-of-technology/