World Teachers' Day - Working With Educational Technology

October 5th is World Teachers' Day! With the increasingly technological world of K-12 education, teachers are just as important as ever. Educational technology should provide support in addressing the myriad challenges teachers face in the classroom. School staff have responsibilities to maintain safety for students and monitor devices to ensure appropriate online activity.

Educational technology is key to helping staff meet these requirements more easily. Schools should recognize and support teachers navigating through how modern technology has changed teaching. Classroom technology for teachers helps enhance teaching with classroom management, device monitoring, and restricting student access to harmful content.

School software acts as an extra layer of support for teachers and para-educators in all areas of work. Here are just some of the ways that teaching can benefit from educational technology in everyday school life.

Student Safety and Wellbeing is Improved by Classroom Technology for Teachers

Cyberbullying is on the rise in today’s classrooms. Therefore, classroom screen monitoring, content filtering, and keyword monitoring on student devices and Teams chats are essential to keep children safe. If teachers don't understand or have access to this technology, they can't effectively address cyberbullying, or monitor online behavior related to self-harm or suicide.

Real-time monitoring (available in the Class Cloud bundle) through thumbnail view helps teachers address any issues as they arise. In this way, digital tools in the classroom can help teachers fulfill their responsibilities to their students.

By using educational technology, teachers can address off-topic behavior, identify harmful activity, and open up channels of communication. Therefore, students can feel comfortable asking for extra guidance in lessons or reporting cyberbullying privately through the classroom software. Ultimately, this helps create a communicative classroom and build trust between students and teachers.

Essential Compliance Requirements for Hybrid Learning

Teachers and all schools have a requirement to understand and follow the rules in place to regulate, control, and safeguard students and their data on the internet. In addition to adopting safety software, having staff aware of compliance policies and procedures eliminates gaps in the school’s security system, maintaining student safety and privacy.

To help with this, Senso Learn provides microlearning courses aimed at informing teachers of their key responsibilities. This is a learning management system (LMS) for teachers and school staff, supporting schools to educate and inform staff on new requirements for tech learning and more.

Key areas of professional development for teachers include:

• Maintaining CIPA compliance: Effectively restrict access to harmful content to qualify under the Children’s Internet Protection Act.
• Protecting children online: Develop competencies and digital skills to identify hazards that children may encounter online.
• Supporting children’s online resilience: Communicate and discuss children’s understanding of online risks and responsibilities.

Learning new aspects of internet safety, legal requirements for internet use, and common issues children face online can be difficult for teachers unfamiliar with using technology in the classroom. Therefore, our courses are easy to understand, providing all the information they will need in one learning dashboard with graphics showing progress on each core topic.

Additionally, schools can add their own learning courses and key documents to the shared school learning management system. This allows each institution to develop a specialized code of computer ethics and best practices that can ground these concepts in the school environment. Therefore, teachers can better understand specific use cases for their learning.

Teachers as Digital Citizenship Role Models

World Teachers’ Day is all about appreciating the important part educators play in all of our lives. Teachers become role models for a whole variety of subjects. So why not also act as a guide to responsible internet use? By using technology in the classroom regularly and responsibly, teachers can demonstrate a fuller appreciation and knowledge of safe internet principles that are vital to an increasingly digital future.

Bringing teachers into a greater and broader understanding of tech and the ways it is revolutionizing work and learning is key to improving teacher retention in a significant way. As digital technology continues to develop, teachers need to keep up so that their students can reach their full potential by making the most of the available technology in a hybrid classroom environment.

However, it is always important to emphasize how safety remains key to all online activity. By bringing Digital Citizenship lessons into the classroom, teachers can help students organically grow a healthy relationship with technology. If teachers learn more about technology, they can more effectively inform and explain key concepts of security, safety, and responsibility to students.

Are you looking to inspire your teachers towards a greater understanding of Digital Citizenship? Do your staff want to help their students better understand and utilize the internet in a responsible way? Check out our upcoming Digital Citizenship Webinar. For more information, get in touch with our team at: Contact Us.