Barriers to the effective use of technology in education

Technology has now worked it's way into every part of our lives, including learning. I'm not only talking about education, but we use technology to learn everyday. YouTube and Wiki How tutorials are now used world wide. As discussed in my last post How technology has changed the way we learn, as teachers we need to support life long learning. These skills need to be given to students during their education, otherwise we aren't equipping our students with the best tools.

Mind map of the barriers to the use of technology in education:


To create this mind map I looked at a book by Megan Poore called Social Media in the classroom; A Practical Guide.  There are many reason why there are so many barriers for using technology in the classroom. The internet especially is very hard to police. Institutions like colleges and university don't want to be held responsible if anything goes wrong. 

(Somekh 2007) asks the question, can you really have people sitting in a computer laboratory doing assessment on screen and ensure that they will not cheat? Using technology in the classroom should improve lessons, not make them harder. I can completely understand that getting technology in the first place depends on funding and budgets. Some colleges and universities may not have enough funding to get all the resources you want. But after all technology is just a tool to aid learning. 

Using social media in the classroom rewards both courage and enterprise. Be intrepid: get out there and try new and different things… but always within the limits of safety. (Poore 2012) 

There are many barriers identified in the mind map I created. As Poore says in the quote above it is all about safety. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are a perfect example of education being used safely online. VLE's allow the students access to all the educational resources within a safe environment.

There will always be barriers to new advancements in education. It is important to find a way of using new advancements in a positive way. Eliminating all the barriers will be pretty much impossible, but as long as the institution is willing to try to overcome certain barriers like cost, copyright, branding etc. it can be very worth while. Other barriers like students posting offensive material, will have to be policed by staff. The students will have to be made aware of the consequences of using the technology in an inappropriate manner. 

If we are serious about education, then we must embrace the best tools that are available to us. If that means accessing tools that are hosted by social media services that are not supported by our organisation then we must find ways of making that access happen safely that responsibly.

(Poore 2012)

As the quote above states, sometimes there is new website that you think will be excellent for your students. If you really believe that it will be beneficial you have to come up of ways to make it safe for your students. I know when I was at college we weren't allowed access to YouTube. My course was a creative media course and our lecturers believed that we should be allowed to access YouTube as it was an excellent source of research. It was granted, but the lecturers had the responsibility to police the media site, to make sure we were using it in an appropriate manner. 

Poore, Megan Using Social Media in the Classroom: A Practical Guide (SAGE 2012)

Somekh, Bridget Pedagogy and Learning with ICT: Researching the Art of Innovation (Routledge 2007)