Technology, this is our life!

Imagine a world without a hard copy of textbooks, paper tests, or hand written stories….

 

This world is coming soon to our classrooms!  American schools are integrating more and more technology into classrooms.  Some of the technology seen within schools today are ipads, smart boards, and computers. With the fast pace of technology being integrated into the daily lives of students, our future kids will be experts on using technology in the near future if they are not already…

 

This being said, we as teachers need to become familiar with the different technology available to us.  Although I am not tech savvy, I am aware that as a teacher I will need to become more comfortable with technology such as smart boards and online tests in order to relate to the ever changing society that my students are growing up in. This week I chose to follow a technology blog written by Will Richardson.  The post was written on October 8 and is entitled “New Workshop on Abundant Learning.”  Will offers different workshops that teach people about implementing technology into teaching and their daily lives.  Some of the statistics about technology listed on his blog were, there are “Two trillion WebPages, two billion people connected online, over 600,000 apps and 1.2 billion smart phones.”  After seeing these statistics it became more clear to me how much technology impacts our daily lives.  We are a technology driven society so, in my opinion, the need for understanding how to implement this in a classroom is important. 

In today’s world we have access to a number of resources online.  Growing up in the 1990's, technology was just beginning.  Over the last 2 decades it has evolved SO much! Will talks about how resources used to be limited, but now we have an “abundance” of resources available, but some people are unsure what to do with them.  As teachers we need to be prepared to integrate it into our classrooms in order to prepare our students for the future.  In the real world they will need to know how to use technology by the time they start their career.  This will help them to get ahead and be prepared when they reach college of begin their career. The workshops sound like a great way to learn and improve skills so that a teacher can keep up with the ever changing society and give their kids a head start in furthering their education.  Will created these workshops because he is aware of the growing need for teachers to be able to understand and implement these resources that are at their finger tips.  I would personally enjoy going to one of the workshops to learn and familiarize myself with different programs and resources to engage my students in the learning process and make sure they understand how to use technology as well. 

Question: Did your teacher integrate technology in your classroom when you were a kid? If so, what did he/she use? If not, do you wish they had?