Technology started to play a huge part in our everyday lives, but besides entertainment and fun, digital technologies are out of huge help when it comes to education. Students use many of those technologies as online tutors that help them and provide them with important information and research materials whenever they need them.
In this case, we are talking specifically about the use of technology in history education. Most students actually don’t like the way history studying is done in their courses and classes, and rarely do they enjoy writing about history. Although implementing technologies that the students are used to in academic education can make things way more enjoyable and increase the student’s creativity and interactivity.
For example, if assigned to write a history essay for college, the students will have better results if they use tools and sites such as https://writix.com/essay-examples/history available online to write their essay instead of going through various library books and hours of research. All in all, the use of technologies for education, especially in history, has drastically increased in the recent years. So, the students need to know about them in order to get their university degree with the same knowledge but less hard work.
Technology can help you in many ways that you didn’t even think of. For example, it can make your exams, term papers, writings, and history lessons way easier for you. So, let’s see how it can do that.
How can Technology Help Students Study History?
Technology Increases Engagement
The use of digital tools and technologies provides the students with engagement opportunities and enhances their assessments, collaboration, learning, teaching, and communication. Technology-based history activities increase the investment among students to explore the historical topics and allow them to participate in simulations that provide them with a realistic experience about some of the most important circumstances and historical events. And also provide them with rich resources such as images, documentaries, and audio files that will provide them with a better understanding of such events.
Technology can be used for Assessment.
One of the main pros of using technology in history education is that it provides a chance for assessment. Through that, the teachers can evaluate their students’ progress, and the students can submit their assignments online. This allows the mentors to provide fast feedback by using tools such as rubrics, which is very useful and saves a lot of time both to the teachers and students.
Technology use for Problem Solving
History is all about solving problems. For example, if students learn about the French Revolution in their school, it would be out of huge help if they knew what was happening in France before the revolution started. Then, they would more easily understand why there was social chaos. And in this case, technology can provide them with interactive timelines of events and how they are related to each other. Those timelines give them a chance to develop their critical thinking skills, and as they contrast and compare those historical events, problem-solving will become easier.
Technology Encourages Creativity
Another way in which technology enhances the student’s history experience is by encouraging their creativity. Apps, simulations, and interactive tools give the students a chance for active learning, allowing them to explore topics about history in ways in which they will promote their creativity, innovation, and thinking skills.
Incorporating Technology in the Classroom
Technology can help with studying by providing up-to-date and reliable information about topics from ancient civilizations all the way until today and the modern history. In addition, as we already mentioned, technology provides the students with simulations, interactive tools, assessments, and way more things that help them in the learning process. So, it would be useful if they had all of those learning opportunities in their traditional classroom. And in order for that to be done, the educators, faculty members, and everyone in the education career need to learn how to use technology in their classrooms.
There are many tools that they can use, both in the traditional classroom and also in online coursework, so let’s see the most popular ones.
- Interactive Timeline- this tool allows the students to choose and click on different events and read all the information about them without relying only on specific books written by the same writer or the same lessons repeatedly.
- Digital Simulations– This tool allows the students to role-play important figures from history, and they have the chance to see how their choices can affect the outcome of a specific event from history. Using this tool also promotes teamwork because the students need to combine their knowledge in order to complete the task successfully.
- Classroom Collaboration– There are many classroom collaboration tools such as Voice Thread, and those tools allow the students to create presentations with each other. By doing this, they can share their knowledge with each other and even update those presentations for grading.
Conclusion:
Using digital technologies for history enhances the students learning experience and helps them develop better critical thinking skills. It also makes the classroom more creative, and the teamwork among the students becomes stronger. We all know that technology can benefit education, but we have no idea how much it can help until we try it.
Meta Description: Teaching history using technology is an amazing way to help students learn all they need about history in a dynamic, exciting, and collaborative manner.