Abstract
Since the Education Bureau of Hong Kong encouraged the use of technology in education, virtual learning platform and PowerPoint slides have become magic tools for teaching and learning across all subjects in schools, colleges, and institutions. However, is technology a magic tool for effective teaching and learning? In order to understand how students think of learning with technology, this chapter investigates 114 college students' attitudes towards learning with technology imposed by the school and teachers through questionnaires. The results reveal that students had positive attitudes towards the use of technology in the affective, cognitive, and behaviour domains. Most importantly, they attributed their success of learning to what the teacher did with technology as well as what the teacher did in the classroom. These findings reveal that technology is not only a good tool to support learning but also fosters the acquisition and application of students' subject knowledge.
TopBackground
Technology pervades everywhere. Students use computers, tablets and mobile phones in various places including home and colleges. Educators, unavoidably, use various kinds of technology into teaching and learning. In addition to the use of software (i.e., Microsoft Word and PowerPoint), virtual learning platform, computers and the Internet, mobile learning and Weblog have also become a trend in education nowadays. Over the past decade, educational administrators have pushed towards the use of technology into teaching and learning. In order to understand whether technology can really support student learning, it’s important to study students’ attitudes towards the use of technology. Knight and Waxman (1991) state that research on learning environment puts emphasis on the paradigm of student cognition, which values the ways that students perceive and react to their learning tasks.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cognitive Domain: Refers to a conceptualization of knowledge dimensions including factual, conceptual, procedural and meta-cognitive knowledge.
Mobile Learning: Refers to learning through mobile phones/devices.
Affective Domain: Refers to the way people react emotionally to the people or things around them and describes their feelings, values, and attitudes.
Virtual Learning Platforms: Refer to an online platform which integrates different kinds of tools like bulletin board, chat room, email, and so on into teaching and learning.
Vlogs: Refer to blogging with videos.
Learning With Information and Communication Technology (ICT): Refers to learning with the use of computer-based management of data, ideas and communication tools.
Web Learning: Refers to learning with the use of computer and the Internet which provides various kinds of resources and tools for learning.
Weblogs: Refers to a kind of notebook in which a hierarchy of texts, pictures, videos are presented in a chorological order.