The articles we read this week were definitely coming from two different perspectives. While I was reading the first article, I felt like I agreed with pretty much everything that was said. Technology definitely helps a lot in the classroom. When I use lessons on my SMART board that are engaging, my students want to come up to the board and show the rest of the class what they know. I can embed different videos off of the internet in order to make my students laugh, see how what we learning can be applied to real life, or look up current events (Check this out for factoring!). We can do so much more, so much faster! I have also used programs like castle learning where you can get instant results for the grade the whole class earns on a test. It will also give you all of the statistics about each question, objective, student, class, and all your classes together. After spending awhile to make the test, the results you get afterwards it definitely worth the effort you have to put in.
However, it definitely depends on the teacher. The article talked about the number of hours and time that you have to put towards learning how to use new technology. To me, that is probably the biggest negative. For instance, this week I got a SMART board in my new classroom. I spent over 3 hours installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling the SMART board software. After playing with the board over and over again, I finally found the only other teacher in the classroom who has one. We spent another 30 minutes playing with the board during our planning period. We started to unplug everything and figured out that one of the cords in the back was cut in half. Well no wonder the stupid thing didn’t work! I think the second article was more geared towards this type of problem. Instead of seeing any positives at all, he was probably only in classroom that used technology ineffectively. At my old school, our principal made it mandatory that we used laptops once in a week in our classrooms. I loved it! I could have the students play math related games, browse the internet to see how much cars cost with different percent of interest rates, and so forth. However, a lot of the other teachers would just let the lap tops sit in their rooms. Yes, it took me awhile to come up with fun activities but my students could apply what we were learning to real life and get real answers right away. Answers that will hopefully help them buy their own car when they turn 16.
The main thing that I have learned over the past couple of years is that you can’t already have a curriculum ready to go and only use technology when you absolutely have to. You need to use the technology to build your curriculum. Now days, students need to know how to use computers, make websites, blogs, tweet, etc. in order to be competitive with others in the job field. If you go into marketing and you need to know how to reach hundreds of people in order to increase your business. The grammar, art, and mathematics have to be used with technology in order to be successful. I feel like a lot of us teachers are letting our students down right now by not including all of the skills that they need to be successful. It’s not always goals and objectives that we are teaching them on a daily basis that make them successful, it’s how they are applying those along with the technology that can set them apart from every other high school graduate.
Another thing that pressed my buttons about the second article, he never used any studies to prove that what he was saying was true. He was clearly just stating his opinion. While we are in school, we are taught that we have to back up our opinion by facts. Our facts must come from reliable sources and we must cite those sources in our articles or papers that we write.
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