I recently came across a discussion on an education technology forum titled “Educational Technology – 7 Deadly Sins”. One of those sins caught my attention as I felt it was completely relevant in today’s world – teaching the tool instead of teaching literacy.

Most of us have jumped on the ICT in education (Information and Communication Technology) bandwagon and are proud of the same. There’s an innate feeling of accomplishment and of moving with and staying in step with the times. But are we really using technology in the most effective way? Are we extracting all that we can out of it for the good of learners around the world?

These questions can only be answered with ambiguous answers, because, as I said before, most of us are guilty of teaching the tool rather than teaching what’s supposed to be taught. Let me illustrate further with an example – when teaching a child to use the Internet to search for information, we would normally introduce them to search engines and get them to type the keywords they are looking for. Anyone with a little common sense can do this much. The hard part comes after this, when you need to analyze the millions of results the search engine throws up and get just the information you are looking for.

Going a step further, the search engines we have today are not intelligent; that is, they are not capable of thought the way human beings are. They are just machines that trawl the Internet at rapid speeds and bring back pages that contain the keywords you entered. Let’s say you entered a keyword that means two different things depending on its usage, like the word “stool”; it could mean either a low, three-legged piece of furniture or bodily excretion. You may be searching for the latter, but the search engines do not know that. They bring up pages with references to both, and if you don’t know anything about the subject you are searching for, well, you’re going to end up learning a whole lot of mixed and incorrect information.

It’s not enough to just teach children how to use technology in their quest for an education; what’s more important is that they learn intuitively how to maximize the use of this technology to develop their own skills, to further their talents, and to enhance the way their thought processes work. Only then can we say that technology has truly played its part in helping children gain a valuable education!