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What Are Icts and What Types of Icts Are Commonly Used in Education?

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What are ICTs and what types of ICTs are commonly used in education?
ICTs stand for information and communication technologies and are defined, for the purposes of this primer, as a “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information.” These technologies include computers, the Internet, broadcasting technologies (radio and television), and telephony.
In recent years there has been a groundswell of interest in how computers and the Internet can best be harnessed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of education at all levels and in both formal and non-formal settings. But ICTs are more than just these technologies; older technologies such as the telephone, …show more content…

But in recent times, factors have emerged which have strengthened and encouraged moves to adopt ICTs into classrooms and learning settings. These have included a growing need to explore efficiencies in terms of program delivery, the opportunities for flexible delivery provided by ICTs (eg. Oliver & Short,
1997); the capacity of technology to provide support for customized educational programs to meet the needs of individual learners (eg. Kennedy & McNaught, 1997); and the growing use of the Internet and WWW as tools for information access and communication (eg. Oliver & Towers,
1999).
As we move into the 21st century, these factors and many others are bringing strong forces to bear on the adoption of ICTs in education and contemporary trends suggest we will soon see large scale changes in the way education is planned and delivered as a consequence of the opportunities and affordances of ICT. This paper seeks to explore the likely changes we will see in education as ICT acts as a powerful agent to change many of the educational practices to which we have become accustomed. In particular, the paper will explore the impact both current and emerging information and communication technologies will be likely to have in coming years on what is learned, when and where learning will take place and how the

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