The way classrooms have been designed for thousands of years stands the instructor in front of their students in order to profess and impart new knowledge unto his/her students. Teaching was worked down to a science. Since the introduction of technology into classrooms professors have been off balance unsuspecting of the immense shift taking place in the way people consume information and learn. When it comes to integrating the vast amount and types of technology available into learning a lot of teachers are still trying to get their footing.

What’s so unique about where we exist in time and progress at the moment is that most students have grown up with technology in their lives and therefore have grown up using technology to learn along the way. This gives these students the advantage of being able to conduct self-directed learning which instinctively integrates technology. These students typically integrate technology in their own unique ways which allows them to have personalized learning through the user-focused nature of technology. The best part is that this personalized learning is based on a lifetime growing up alongside technology and integrating it into their learning so the effectiveness of the students ability to integrate the technology in the learning only gets better as time goes on and new tools become available.

Teaching which effectively integrates technology is hard to come by. Teachers nowadays have turned to slide shows hoping that they are the answer to integrating technology into teaching. But the potential is far greater than that. There are however some major barriers to teachers trying to integrate technology into teaching; barriers like the fact that most teachers are digital immigrants who have not grown up using technology to learn so have no idea how it could be used to teach.

We can all be happy though because the times they are a changing. As time progresses were seeing more and more digital native teachers entering the system with a far better idea of how technology can be used both in the teaching and learning processes. As these teachers get older and gain more accreditation in their industry, they will be able to change the education system and create a more modern classroom format to substitute the medieval classroom format which is still being used today.