The following are the reasons why Information Technology is needed in education:
- Access to education anytime anywhere is needed
- Information explosion is an ever increasing phenomena therefore there is need to get access to this information
- IT is important in meeting the needs of variety of learners
- Technological literacy is a requirement of the society that the individuals should possess
- IT can increase access and bring down the cost of education to meet the challenges of illiteracy and poverty
Significance of Information Technology in education
- Access to variety of learning resources
In the era of technology, IT aids ample resources to improve the teaching skills and learning ability. With the help of IT, it is now easy to provide audio visual education. The learning resources are being widens and widen. Now with this vivid and vast technique as part of the IT curriculum, learners are encouraged to regard computers as tools to be used in all aspects of their studies. In particular, they need to make use of the new multimedia technologies to communicate ideas, describe projects, and order information in their work.
- Immediacy to information
IT has provided immediacy to education. New IT has often been introduced into well-established patterns of working and living without radically altering them. For example, the traditional office, with secretaries working at keyboards and notes being written on paper and manually exchanged, has remained remarkably stable, even if personal computers have replaced typewriters.
- Any time learning
Now in the year of computers and web networks the pace of imparting knowledge is very fast and one can be educated .One can study whenever he wills irrespective of whether it is day or night and irrespective of being in India or in US because of the boom in IT.
- Collaborative learning
Now IT has made it easy to study as well as teach in groups or in clusters. With online we can be united together to do the desired task. Well-organized postal systems, the telephone (fixed and mobile), and various recording and playback systems based on computer technology all have a part to play in educational broadcasting in the new millennium. The Internet and its Web sites are now famous to many children in developed countries and among educational elites elsewhere, but it remains of little significance to many more, who lack the most basic means for subsistence.
- Multimedia approach to education
Audio-Visual Education, planning, preparation, and use of devices and materials that involve sight, sound, or both, for educational purposes. Among the devices used are still and motion pictures, filmstrips, television, transparencies, audiotapes, records, teaching machines, computers, and videodiscs. The growth of audio-visual education has reflected developments in both technology and learning theory.
- Authentic and up to date information
The information and data which are obtained on the net is purely correct and up to date.
Internet, a collection of computer networks that operate to common standards and enable the computers and the programs they run to communicate directly provides true and correct information.
- Online library
Internet supports thousands of various kinds of operational and experimental services one of which is online library. We can get plenty of data on this online library.
As part of the IT curriculum, learners are encouraged to regard computers as tools to be used in all aspects of their studies. In particular, they need to make use of the new multimedia technologies to communicate ideas, describe projects, and order information in their work. This requires them to select the medium best suited to conveying their message, to structure information in a hierarchical manner, and to link together information to produce a multidimensional document.
- Distance learning
The convergence of increased demand for access to educational facilities and innovative communications technology has been increasingly exploited in face of criticisms that distance learning is an inadequate substitute for learning alongside others in formal institutions. The cost per student has been reduced. At the same time, students studying at home can save time and other costs.
- Better access to children with disabilities
Information technology has brought radical changes in the life of disabled children. IT provides various software and system to educate these poor people. Unless provided early with special training, profoundly deaf since birth are incapable of learning to speak. Deafness from birth causes severe sensory deprivation, which can seriously affect a person’s intellectual capacity or ability to learn.