As a student, I was never especially fond of technology being used in the classroom. I found it time consuming and complicated and never seemed to understand the importance of technology in comparison with more traditional teaching techniques. In most cases, the faults of a technological classroom lesson fell on the inability of the teacher to properly use the tools he or she were trying to implement. For instance, I had quite a few teachers who didn't know how to use their Smartboard correctly or had immense trouble trying to log the entire laptop fleet into the school's wifi signal.
I did however have one teacher in high school who was incredibly efficient and reliable when it came to using technology in the classroom. My AP Calculus teacher in high school used her Smartboard every day in ways I never considered a math teacher to use in meaningful application. Although I don't remember specific programs she used, I do remember that she utilized a very specific and organized lesson plan centered around the activities on the Smartboard for every day we had class. Each morning, when we walked in the classroom, she had a problem written on the Smartboard and we were expected to solve it. Each group would come up and demonstrate their problem solving on the board and then the teacher would correct mistakes and re-write the appropriate notation. She utilized multiple math websites for examples and showed us Youtube videos of mathematicians. She constantly pulled up the huge electronic sheet of graph paper to show how to graph functions and tables. She also integrated a really helpful graphing calculator program that helped students discover the in's and out's of the complicated tool.
This teacher was one of the only teachers I had that was able to successfully use new technology in the classroom without allowing it to become a time-consumer for her students. As an English teacher, I'm sure there are thousands of new and interesting technological tools that can be implemented into the classroom and I'm excited to learn about them and use them in my own curriculum. Despite my prior concerns with technology in the classroom, I am quite open to the innovations and benefits of introducing it to students and I'm eager to learn more about it.
Great Blog beginning! it's true technology takes time. It's true that it's not always efficient in the sense of reliability and it's complex. One thing I hope you get out of this class is that learning Technology changes not just what people learn, but how, when, where, etc. Technology use takes many, many forms and I hope as a teacher you'll learn to figure out the how, when, where in a way that best suits your learner's futures!
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