Information and Communication Technology as informative tool 

Information and communication technology will provide help to teachers in improving their teaching and learning in the classroom. There are five tools to provide assistance:

1. informative tool
2. communicative tool
3.  constructive tool
4. co-constrictive tool
5. situating tool

In particular, I would like to talk about the informative tool. 

Informative tools are applications that provide a large amount of information in various formats such as texts, graphics, sounds or videos. Informative tool can be regarded as passive repository of information. Examples includes: multimedia encyclopedia, digital library, music, videos, youtube. The internet is an enormous database and everyone including the teachers consider internet as the most important ICT tool in e-learning environments.

Students rely on the internet to help them do their homework and so does the parents while they are on the responsibility of their children's learning. The teachers, parents and students all consider the internet as a virtual textbook, reference library, virtual tutor and a virtual study group. Another common source of information is the television. This source has provided to benefit most of the rural areas in the country where the internet connectivity is very weak. The students there use the channels on the TV to drive out the best information.

The benefits of informative tools

This tool helps in integrating the relevant ideas from different sources. If the students are given a project to do on climate change, they will have to segregate through millions of information which will first develop their search skills. All the information accessible will not be of relevance to the project work so the students need to be able to segregate them and in doing so, they will learn how to be specific while typing their searches on URL. Then after the information, they will have to read through many sources and then integrate the varieties to meet a good end product.  

While there are millions of sources on the internet, not all the sources are authentic. To authenticate and verify the information searched, the student will need to evaluate the resources and this will add to their learning. They will also have to analyze and criticize the information which will end up helping them be more logical and be able to select the right information that they might need. Altogether, this will enhance the critical thinking, develop information search skills and learn to evaluate resources on the internet.