Just adding technology is not enough for improving education

Abstract

Technology pervades every aspect of our lives, including the realm of education. The possible improvements are not always straightforward to point out in spite of the tremendous potential of the current technology. The challenge is even bigger as there are significant delays in wide spread adoption among teachers, institutions and educational systems at various levels.

In this paper, there are discussed some of the main elements which influence the adoption of new technology in the classrooms and educational institutions. There are a multitude of aspects which have a bearing on the successful and fruitful adoption of novel technology such as: the level of digital literacy of both students and educators, the degree of technical support available at the institutions, the number of hours of training allocated for getting used to the added technology and the amount of time allocated to the users to just tinker with the new systems in order to discover the best ways of using them vis-à-vis of their specific use case.