ABSTRACT

Essentially, this long essay examines the impact of technology on educational development. The background study covers the area of the long essay’s focus, the significance of the study, the need of the study, the scope of the study and definition of terms which forms the chapter one of as the study.

Chapter two examines the impact of technology on education laying emphasis on technology’s impact on learning, impact of technology on the education system and the technology’s impact on education practices.

Chapter three discussed technology and educational development which is further broken into benefits of technology integration in education as well as the achievement of technology and education so far.

Finally, the chapter four contains the summary, conclusion as well as recommendations proffered on ways and strategies to maximise the use of technology especially in Nigeria so as to have the expected education development.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1        Background to the study

As the saying goes “Technology is the bedrock of any national development”. Education can be viewed as the tool or vehicle that can hasten up the development as well as the achievement of any programme and activity of any nation that has focus. This implies that any country devoid of education and especially not having a solid back up of a useful and functional technology may become backward, redundant, under developed and as such achieve no goals.

According to ED report on “the cost and effectiveness of educational technology”, it was stated that ‘through the use of advanced computing and telecommunications technology, learning can also be qualitatively different. The process of learning in the classroom can become significantly richer as students have access to new and different types of information, can manipulate it on the computer through graphic displays or controlled experiments in ways never before possible, and can communicate their results and conclusions in a variety of media to their teachers, students in the next classroom, or students around the world. For example, using technology, students can collect and graph real-time weather, environmental, and population’s data from their community use that data to create colour maps and graphs, and then compare these maps to others created by students in other communities. Similarly, instead of reading about the human circulatory system and seeing textbook pictures depicting blood flow, students can use technology to see blood moving through veins and arteries, watch the process of oxygen entering the bloodstream, and experiment to understand the effects of increased pulse or cholesterol – filled on blood flow”

“We know now – based on decades of use in schools, on findings of hundreds of research studies, and on the everyday experiences of educators students, and their families – that, properly used, technology can enhance the achievement of all students, increase families involvement in their children’s schooling , improve teachers skills and knowledge and improve school administration and management.

Evidently the research so far has checked on how technology affects the school learning systems which can be related to student, teachers and so to say the entire management of the school system but not categorically stating the impact it made in developing the educational system which is now the major focus of this research work.