Elements of Educational Technology

The article "The Meanings of Educational Technology" was interesting to read. I found that it described many things I had already understood about the use of technology in education.

The one thing that stood out to me the most is related to the fact that this article was written in 2004--almost a decade ago. It seems to me that the practice and use of technology in education should have evolved more in the last ten years, as more teachers and schools have adopted technology as learning tools rather than teaching tools.

Ten years ago, few students used cell phones, and tablets like the iPad did not exist. Google was primarily a search engine challenging Yahoo!, and social networking was mostly limited to listservs, RSS feeds and personal blogs. The interactivity of Web 2.0 technology was in its infancy, in the form of MySpace. The word "technology" typically referred only to personal computers and PDAs, and very few PDAs were Internet-enabled.

That said, despite the age of the document, its writers were very forward-thinking in that the concepts outlined in the document are still valid, even with today's wide array of software and hardware technology.