The Fifth Reflective Journal (TLL)

Using technology to teach thinking skills

By

 Tri Okta Ervina

The using of technology cannot be separated with all the activities in this world. It uses for working, studying even teaching. Nowadays, teaching and learning process are almost using the high technology in the classroom. All of the kind of skills can be taught by using technology, those are speaking, listening, writing, reading, moreover thinking skill. How great it is for our education. In this case, I want to explain more about using technology to teach thinking skills because the technology to teach speaking, listening, writing and reading have already explained by me in the previous reflective journal.

Thinking skill is the skill which includes critical thinking abilities. Everyone has their thinking abilities but the level of it is different for each people. By existing the technology, everyone can be helped by it when doing everything, especially when they have difficulty in thinking of something. In the teaching and learning process, technology also helps the students to be creative for increasing their thinking abilities. As the high quality of teacher candidates, we have to know the good way to teach the students by using technology to support their thinking abilities.

Teacher is the important element in this case because the technology can be used to support thinking skills if the teacher allows some requirements. The requirements for making the classroom active in using technology to support the students thinking skills are setting some learning activities in the classroom by encouraging the student’s cognitive processes, selecting the technology tools that are appropriate for the students to support thinking and problem solving activities, and the last is the using of the tools in learning approach based on understanding of inquiry, problem based learning and language learning.

So the conclusion is the technology can help the students to support thinking skills if the students recognize, understand and apply the technology itself in appropriate manner. Beside that, the tools which are used have all the kinds of menus in helping them based on the students’ need. Selecting the tools is the important one for the teacher to help the students for increasing their thinking skills.