Teachers can help students think about the rhetorical choices they make when using different forms of technology. For example, when creating a video, students may choose to overlay music over the video, mute the audio on the computer’s speaker or record the actual background noise in the filmed scene. The choice the student makes is the rhetorical decision, and teachers can help students get used to thinking rhetorically about these decisions.
Technology opens up new opportunities for collaboration and student participation. Communication mediums, such as email, allow students to communicate more often when working together on a project. Some technological forms are more conducive to collaboration, such as wikis, which are online documents that anyone can edit. Also, social networking tools encourage bashful students to take part in online activities, since they can manage their anxiety when communicating more easily. Paul Harvey, a history professor at University of Colorado Colorado Springs, uses blogs to encourage students to post questions, comments and grievances toward authors read in class.
Overall, technological integration in the classroom can increase student engagement, since students are accustomed to interacting with technology outside the classroom and experience a disconnect between school and the outside world.
Technology gives teachers more opportunities to interact with students. Teachers can communicate with students through videoconferencing, which helps the teacher to send both verbal and nonverbal signals. Teachers can also create podcasts that students can download, which allows students to review class content and allows teachers to give students individualized advice.
Teachers can help students develop skills helpful when using the Internet. Online technologies sometimes have security and safety concerns, since students are often interacting anonymously with other people. Not only can students meet people of questionable character, but they also can encounter information on websites that lack credibility. Teachers can help students learn research and critical thinking skills that allow them to distinguish reliable sources from biased ones.
Students can work together to create products, such as websites and WebQuests. WebQuests are Internet-based tasks that have been around since the beginning of the Internet. They require students to engage in more advanced cognitive activities.
Students have varying learning styles they find ideal. Some students learn more easily by hearing verbal instructions, while other students must see something to understand it. Technology increases the number of ways that educators can teach students by creating more dynamic visuals, such as computer simulations depicting the water cycle in a science class.