Presentation on Information and Communication Technologies as Pedagogical Tools

During the Ibero-American Forum, Virtual Educa Caribe at FUNGLODE Headquarters in Santo Domingo, Elsa Herrero Tunis, Director of the Reference Center for Higher Education at the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverría in Cuba (CUJAE), and José Manuel Fernández of the Universidad Abierta para Adultos (UAPA – Open University for Adults),  gave a presentation titled, “The Use of
Technological Tools as Teaching Aids,” in which they emphasized the need for educators to become experts in technology in order to further contribute to the academic development of their students.

 

Herrero Tunis presented the vision of the CUJAE administration with regard to increasing the incorporation of technological tools within educational instruction. She discussed the institute’s creation of a program on
teleteaching which encompasses all university activities and works in accordance with four research and development guidelines. She also discussed three innovative projects realized by the Cuban institute: the CUJAE educational portal which allows students to easily obtain precise information; the organization of material through the creation of a multidisciplinary group in the teleteaching program; and the development of virtual resource centers, through which close to 4,000 professors and
students of CUJAE and other centers have received training.

 

The Research Center Director maintained that the institute promotes pedagogical models that support student self-learning, utilizing technological tools, based on the principal of learning by doing.

 

José Manuel Fernández of the Universidad Abierta para Adultos (UAPA – Open University for
Adults), discussed his experience as a classroom educator and emphasized that the use of technology represents an opportunity to improve conceptual understanding and further the development of student assimilation and production capacities. He argued that the use of information and communications technologies seeks to confront the problem of present day education, not as a technical problem, but as a social problem that demands reflection, justice and deliberation, understanding that the
term “technology” goes beyond electronic devises.

 

In the discipline of distance education, the use of electronic resources presupposes a significant advance. UAPA uses innovative tools to incorporate Information and Communication Technologies within learning environments, including: forums, chats, videos, audios, and downloadable and uploadable archives.

 

Virtual Educa Caribe, an initiative of Global Foundation for Democracy and Development (GFDD) and Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE), was launched in Santo Domingo during the Inter-American Forum on New Technologies that took place in April, 2007.The forum seeks to promote discussion and foster the use of new technologies in education, capacity building and training. In this sense, Virtual Educa Caribe seeks to contribute to elevating labor efficiency
and ultimately economic growth and competitiveness in the country.