The First Post

Last Friday was day one of my adventure into the world of technology as it applies to education. Growing up, I had little use for technology. With a brother who was interested in video games, computer games, and gadgets, I was content to do my own thing and read books and bake cookies. This trend continued when I moved away for my first year of university. Instead of buying me a computer to assist in my studies, my parents gave me an acoustic guitar to take with me. Luckily, the guitar attracted a cute boy who loves technology and introduced me to the world of Macs. I started to explore a little bit with some of the fun programs, and became relatively effective at using them.

When I started the MT program, I really got to explore technology. I was told to be creative with my assignments, and I ended up making some really neat projects using Garage Band, Pages, iWeb and iPhoto. I was able to see firsthand how using this technology in my projects opened up a whole new world for me and let my creativity shine through. It also made me much more interested in completing my projects because I was having fun exploring the programs as well as producing my projects.

In semester three of the MT program I was lucky enough to have a Smartboard in my classroom during my student teaching experience. It was a new toy for my partner teacher as well, so we had lots of fun figuring it out together. I started planning all of my lessons on it, and was really pleased with the ease at which I could transition from notes to pictures or videos and include more multimedia for my students. While I became good at using the Smartboard, I didn't get the students using it as much as I wanted to. Two things stood in the way of that. One, it was difficult to find interactive lessons at the grade level I was teaching so I had to create them myself. Secondly, I had to get the students over their fear of standing in front of the class using the Smartboard. This brought up some questions for me that I would like to explore further during this course. For example, even if you have lots of technological resources available to you, how do you set up your classroom so that all students can access the technology and use it effectively? What does this technology savvy classroom look like, and how is it managed? I am also interested in how to go about setting up inquiry projects for students involving internet searches because I haven't seen that done during my student-teaching.

I believe that the strengths I bring to this class are my experience with some of the popular educational programs and my desire to learn about the big picture of using technology in the classroom. By big picture I mean what the classroom will look like and what kinds of activities promote learning on many levels. This includes learning about the topic, learning how to use the technology, and learning to collaborate with others.

It is amazing that while I had no use for technology as a child, it now affects pretty much everything I do. Who would have thought a few years ago that my dad, after sending me off to university with just a guitar, would now be emailing me songs that he recorded on his computer and web conferencing with me to talk about it!