Lession-1-Meaning of Educational Technology

Many definition have been given by many authors about educational technology but this definition is what i like most. "Educational Technology is a complex, integrated process involving people, procedures, ideas and organization for analyzing problems and devising, implementing, evaluating and managing the solutions to those problems, involves in all aspect in human learning"

 By this definition we can understand fully what educational technology means. There are terms associated with educational technology, like instructional technology, technology in education and educational media they are parts of educational technology. Each parts has it own role to achieve learning and lastly of technology in education, it sounds alike but it is not. Technology in education is the application of technology to any of those processes involved in the operating institution of educational enterprise.

We must remember that educational technology is not just a tool or a device it involves process, procedure and activities, instructional and curricular designs, learning environment and system.

LESSON 8- Teaching with Contrived Experiences

The second from the base of the Dale's Cone of Experiences is contrived experience. These experiences are edited copies of reality and are use as a substitutes for the real things when it is not practical nor impossible to bring the real thing in the classroom and are designed to simulate to real life situations.


Models, mock-up, specimen and object(artifacts), simulation and games are contrived experiences.

There is a difference between a game an a simulation. games are played to win while simulation need not have a winner, simulation seems to be more easily applied to the study of the issues rather than to process. 

We should make use of contrived experiences to overcome limitation of space and time, to edit reality for us to be able to focus on parts or process of the system that we intend to study, to overcome difficulties of size, to understand the inaccessible and help the learners understand abstraction.




MODEL of a carbon atom                                                 MOCK-UP of the planetarium
SPECIMEN of a dissected frog

Direct, Purposeful Experiences and Beyond

Good or bad experiences is still an experience. There is a lesson learned from it that could heigthen our sensitivity to the world.

There are to kinds of experience, the direct and indirect experiences. Direct experience is our fist hand experience that make up the foundation of our learning in contrast to indirect experience this is not a first hand experience but rather vicarious experience. 

Direct experience is said to be purposeful because they are internalized in the senses and it involves the asking of questions that have significance in the life of the person undergoing the experience and this experiences have undergone in relation to a learning purposes.

"Direct purposeful experiences and beyond" implies that these experiences must be brought to the higher plane and the higher plane is referred here is the level of abstraction and generalization.

In teaching and learning process, it implies that we must give our students opportunities to learn by doing, make use of real thing as an instructional materials as much as possible, we must help our students develop their five senses to the full to heigthen their sensitivity to the world, guide our student draw meaning from the first hand experiences and elevate their level of thinking and lastly we must not be tempted to get stuck to the concrete and fail to bring up our students to the higher level of thinking process.