New trends and strategies for integrating popular technologies into everyday educational practice are a necessary condition for the modernization of the education system. Today, technologies are the driving force and coordinator of the growing globalization of the educational environment. Lecturers understand that the combination of digital technologies and resources provides more opportunities for improving the quality of teaching and learning than all previous educational technologies. Digital study materials differ from traditional ones in their ability to manage them.
Information and communication technologies are the focal points, as the Internet is a unique tool for the wide, accessible distribution of educational material. As the Internet has become a medium of interaction, its potential for teaching and learning has grown. It is not surprising that with new technologies growth, educational process changes. Nowadays every student can, for example, type, “write my essay for me” in a search engine and get access to thousands of papers with a lot of fresh ideas or simply buy the needed work at custom services like pro-papers.com. Do my essay searches help students to obtain an understanding of what they strive for during their own researches? Most importantly, students are those who influence the introduction of technologies at all levels of education. The development of an automatic and non-automatic set of interactions between machines, people and systems for various processes is important. Many attempts to introduce new tools into the educational process disappointed their initiators because they didn’t pay enough attention to the systems used, the people and the ways they interacted. Many organizations have already defined the goals of introducing technologies in the educational process; have developed norms and standards for teachers to use the appropriate tools.
It is needed to determine some hi-tech and their endless advantages throughout the learning process.
The three most popular LMS (learning management systems) (Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai) provide a concentration of training materials and courses, and also cover course management, registration, course planning, discussion forums, blog sites, evaluations. The main functions of the LMS include controlled access through a password for selected courses. The LMS keeps track of what materials a student has access to and how much time he spends on them. It analyzes training activities to collect data available to the LMS about student activities. Accounting systems in the LMS contain basic information about students, such as registration data, course selection, course plan, qualification goals, training time and tracking information. LMSs are also used as data stores for training, resources, and materials. For example, the course developer can provide commercial materials or free of charge available open educational resources. Materials can be presented in various formats – from simple text files to interactive multimedia. LMS distinguishes three main types of communication tools: e-mail, forums/webinars and chat rooms, which can also be used to include students in the publication of materials or can serve as download mechanisms through blogs or wikis, links to other web resources, etc.
Another popular technology that is getting more and more popular every day in educational entities is social media. In various countries, there is a tendency for the increasing importance of social media in the educational sector. In particular, the practice of private, elite, individual education is becoming more common, which inevitably entails a decline in the role of traditional public education. This trend threatens the realization of one of the most important functions of education – socialization. In this context, social media provides young people with the opportunity to maintain numerous contacts with their peers based on common interests (such as for example, sports or creativity, collective learning activities in the network, knowledge sharing).
In the contemporary world, educational institutions can no longer function effectively without technologies. Moreover, educational services are provided to students and teachers via the Internet. Acquisition and maintenance of various computer hardware and software constantly require significant financial investments and the involvement of qualified specialists, so educational institutions increasingly use the services of cloud technologies, getting them for free or for a small fee. Often such services are more accessible and reliable than their placement or support in the educational institution itself.
Cloud technologies have:
- Remote data centers. Cloud services are provided via the Internet from high-tech data centers that are remote from the end-user and the organization to which he belongs;
- Combined resources. Resources such as storage devices, processors, RAM, and network bandwidth are shared among all users and, if necessary, allocated dynamically;
The explosion of the popularity of massive open online courses over the past two years has given a huge push to talks about a revolution has begun in the world of education and that it will soon be completely transformed. Indeed, with the development of technologies, a lot of new educational opportunities emerged, and now they are at an early stage of development.
Massive online courses are a form of remote learning via the Internet. In addition, these are open courses, i.e. you do not need to pay money for participating in them. It really helps people who cannot afford everyday commuting.
The reviewed ways of new educational directions correspond to the most important issues of the development of new information and communication technologies in various educational sectors. An analysis of alternative models of education in the digital age shows how the forms of education are changing and what new resources are needed for this (training platforms, mobile learning and cloud technologies in education, social media). All this determines the new competencies of teachers, methods of socializing people, the new organization of education using modern means of managing the educational process, new approaches to the formation of curricula and methods of assessment based on the use of information and communication technologies.