Extensive Implementation of Information Communication Technology Among Teachers in Social Studies in Enhancing Students’ Performance

It is important that the education system maximizes the use of ICT to ensure that real added value is provided in terms of improvements in teaching and learning and in supporting the drive to raise standards for all high school students. Social Studies has emphasized the need to ensure that ICT is embedded across all aspects of teaching and learning in schools.

The implementation of the extensive use of ICT in high school students will require greater collaboration between schools and ICT has a significant part to play in helping to provide access to a wider range of general and applied courses. Planned developments will increase the functionality for schools to monitor student and school performance, including the ability to benchmark the students’ performance to acquire skills and knowledge in ICT and will enhance students’ burden on school projects in responding to every activity of the subject area. The subject will be using ICT as the preferred means of communicating, instructing and teaching and conducting students electronically and virtually.

Increasingly, ICT as a management tool is providing a rich source of information on student progress, enabling areas for development specifically in Social Studies to be identified and addressed early .Work is proceeding to procure additional systems to improve the way in which statistical information is handled in any school between teachers and students. Within school it will provide a rich source of data at individual student level and at overall school level.

Technology can, at least in theory, have a “profound effect” on social studies, a subject traditionally dominated by transmission-oriented teaching. Technology use can create more student-centered, constructivist approaches to the subject than have characterized the field in the past. Some secondary-level school subject cultures are more willing than others to incorporate technology into their instruction. Their study found that history and geography teachers were among those teachers most resistant to changing their traditional modes of instruction to accommodate the use of computers in classrooms. Given traditional patterns, the incorporation of technology typically demands reconfiguring practice on a variety of levels. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many social studies teachers have failed to embrace the use of technology

The problem in Social Studies is to enhance student’s performance through the extensive use of ICT

1. What are the teaching strategies to be used to enhance student’s performance?
   1. What are the problems being encountered by the teachers in teaching Social Studies?
   2. How could we uplift the student’s performance through the use of ICT?
   3. How will ICT develop teaching strategies that could be of interest for the students?

ICT is considered as one of the “high tech” gadgets which includes computers, video and audio as means of teaching-learning process. It will continue to support and promote the classroom through its implementation by teachers by making presentations for students that highlight their lesson in Social Studies. In process, an e-learning dimension to their classroom practice works. It is part of initial teacher development and the students as the main client of this study.

It facilitates its use by teachers for the student performance as a powerful teaching tool. The range of material available to schools on ICT will be growing through its use. There is a great impact on the part of the students because ICT will be of great interest among them. By employing technology to teach innovative curriculum dealing with the student’s performance, the study attempts to motivate students, to use technology in teaching. This strategy has succeeded by linking digital technology with powerful social studies content that holds considerable relevance to the students of such school.

Technology can also be seen as one of the most powerful tools available to students today to interrupt the inheritance of traditional method. As a creative, connective force, technology like the Internet and World Wide Web can put students in touch with other students across the globe, making visible and immediate extensive knowledge about their lives, struggles, rights, and histories. Such connections facilitate collective assessments and insights into traditonal’s impact in diverse cultural contexts. ICT offers teacher to educate students in varied means of manipulating and displaying lessons effectively through semantic maps, graphic organizers, and timelines, all of which help illuminate matters of relationship, causality, and sequence for young students of today in social studies classrooms.

The new views of the learning process and the shift to student-centred learning have emerged based on cognitive learning research and the confluence of several theories that have informed our understanding of the nature and context of learning. Some of the most prominent theories include: sociocultural theory (based on Vygotsky’s intersubjectiveness and Zone of Proximal Development), constructivism theory, self-regulated learning, situated cognition, cognitive apprenticeship, problem-based learning (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt), cognitive flexibility theory (Spiro et al, 1988), and distributed cognition (Salomon et al, 1993). Each of these theories is based on the same underlying assumptions that learners are active agents, purposefully seeking and constructing knowledge within a meaningful context.

The learner engages in authentic tasks in authentic contexts using authentic tools and is assessed through authentic performance. The environment provides the learner with coaching and scaffolding in developing knowledge and skills. It provides a rich collaborative environment enabling the learner to consider diverse and multiple perspectives to address issues and solve problems. It also provides opportunities for the student to reflect on his or her learning. Although the new learning environment can be created without the use of technology, it is clear that ICTs can provide powerful tools to help learners access vast knowledge resources, collaborate with others, consult with experts, share knowledge, and solve complex problems using cognitive tools. ICTs also provide learners with powerful new tools to represent their knowledge with text, images, graphics, and video.

The new view of the learning process is based on research that has emerged from theoretical frameworks related to human learning. Many reflect a constructivism view of the learning process. In this view, learners are active agents who engage in their own knowledge construction by integrating new information into their schema or mental structures. The learning process is seen as a process of “meaning-making” in socially, culturally, historically, and politically situated contexts. In a constructivism learning environment, students construct their own knowledge by testing ideas and approaches based on their prior knowledge and experience, applying these to new tasks, contexts and situations, and integrating the new knowledge gained with pre-existing intellectual constructs.

A constructivist environment involves developing learning communities comprised of students, teachers and experts who are engaged in authentic tasks in authentic contexts closely related to work done in the real world. A constructivist learning environment also provides opportunities for learners to experience multiple perspectives. Through discussion or debate, learners are able to see issues and problems from different points of view, to negotiate meaning, and develop shared understandings with others. The constructivist learning environment also emphasizes authentic assessment of learning rather than the traditional paper-pencil test.

It is important to note that some very strong models of teacher education provide simultaneous professional development for more than one group. For example, pre-service preparation can be aligned with in-service teacher education. A practicing teacher may work with a pre-service teacher education student on an innovative educational project. This not only increases the research potential of the in-service teacher, but the pre-service teacher also experiences role modelling and, as a result, may have an easier transition into teaching.

In planning for the infusion of ICTs into teacher preparation programmes, several factors important to a programme’s success must be considered. This section provides a holistic framework to assist in designing the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into teacher education. The framework is coherent with the context provided by today’s society and reflects more recent understandings of the nature of learning, including aspects of learning communities during the school years and beyond into lifelong learning. The holistic framework will help teacher educators and administrators consider the cultural and educational system context, technology resources, and other factors that are important in planning the integration of technology into the pre-service curriculum. Limited technology resources and conditions of rapid change in educational, economic and political systems challenge many contexts of this curriculum. In some regions, the shortage of teachers, teacher educators, facilities and standards has been chronic for years and has reached crisis proportions. Access to ICT resources may also be quite limited. Within this document, ICTs should be broadly defined as including “interactive radio” and multiple media including TV, as well as computers and hand-held electronic devices.

A generic ICT in teacher education curriculum framework is provided in Figure 2. The encompassing oval underscores that the framework should be interpreted as a whole. To select parts or to simply copy the framework in rote fashion without taking care to understand the synergy of the whole would be a mistake. As the term synergy implies, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For example, an approach resulting from informed leadership and vision is essential for ensuring that all the components of planning and implementing a technology integration plan are present and that they support one another.

The framework was designed by representatives of international projects to assist policy makers, course developers, teacher educators, and other professionals who are charged with developing the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in teacher education. The model will help assure that national and local infrastructure, culture and context, among other factors, will be considered in designing new curricula, and that curricula will be kept up to date, as new developments are forged in education and ICTs.

In summary, as professional teachers educators continually develop their pedagogical use of ICTs to support learning, teaching, and curriculum development, including assessment of learners and the evaluation of teaching, they will:

• demonstrate understanding of the opportunities and implications of

the uses of ICTs for learning and teaching in the curriculum context;

• plan, implement, and manage learning and teaching in open and flexible

learning environments;

• assess and evaluate learning and teaching in open and flexible learning

environments.

The challenge for ICTs in Teacher Education is to assure that the new generation of teachers, as well as current teachers, are well prepared to use new

learning methods, processes and materials with the new ICT tools for learning. The following sections provide a road map to help teacher education institutions meet the challenge.

The ICT and teachers in Araling Panlipunan has come with the following basic principles in using this as a tool in teaching the subject, these are

• Technology should be infused into the entire teacher educationprogramme. Throughout their teacher education experience, students should learn about and with technology and how to incorporate it into their own teaching. Restricting technology experiences to a single course or to a single area of teacher education, such as methods courses, will not prepare students to be technology-using teachers. Pre-service teacher education students should learn about a wide range of educational technologies across their professional preparation, from introductory and foundations courses to student teaching and professional development experiences.
• Technology should be introduced in context. Teaching pre-service studentsbasic computer literacy-the traditional operating system, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, database, and telecommunications topics is not enough. As with any profession, there is a level of literacy beyond general computer literacy. This more specific or professional literacy involves learning to use technology to foster the educational growth of students. Professional literacy is best learned in context. Pre-service students should learn many uses of technology because they are integrated into their coursework and field experiences. They should see their professors and mentor teachers model innovative uses of technology; they should use it in their own learning, and they should explore creative uses of technology in their teaching. Teacher educators, content specialists, and mentor teachers should expose pre-service teachers to regular and pervasive modeling of technology and provide opportunities for them to teach with technology in 3rd-4th year class.
• Students should experience innovative technology-supported learningenvironments in their teacher education programme.Technology can be used tosupport traditional forms of learning as well as to transform learning. APowerPoint presentation, for example, can enhance a traditional lecture,but it does not necessarily transform the learning experience. Onthe other hand, using multimedia cases to teach topics that have previouslybeen addressed through lectures may well be an example of alearning experience transformed by technology. Students should experienceboth types of uses of technology in their programme; however,the brightest promise of technology in education is as a support fornew, innovative, and creative forms of teaching and learning process.