Technology Integration

Technology integration is becoming more and more popular in everyday classrooms. Just looking at two of my classes this semester, I have CEP 416 and CEP 452, both which talk about technology that can be used in a classroom or how technology can be beneficial to teachers and students.

As much as I have hated joining all these websites and having to check them all the time, I am learning a lot and their many uses. I personally think of Twitter in a whole new way now that you can have chats with other educators or other people with a specific interest. I also like how we have learned how to have everyone’s blogs show up on an RSS. To me that is so nice because otherwise I would forget about the cool sites that I like to look at to see if they have updates, but now they all just come to me!

But back to Technology integration in the classroom, my placements that I had last year were on two totally different spectrum of technology. One of my placements was in a 4th grade classroom and all the technology they had was 1 computer in the classroom, an overhead, television, and an elmo on certain days (depending on who else needed it, there was only two for the entire school).  This school didn’t use the internet at all except for the school’s home web page and the teachers email address. My teacher here tried to email her students parents everyday or at least every other day to let the parents know how their child is doing in class.

However, in my other classroom I was placed in last year was a resource room for 7th and 8th graders. Most of the students in this classroom had ADD or a hearing impairment. This classroom had much more technology integration than my other placement. Here they had a whole cupboard filled with DVD player, VHS player, stereo, and the projection  machine thing we have in our classrooms here on campus.  He also only had 1 computer in his classroom, but allowed the students to use it for academic purposes.  Also in this classroom my teacher would wear a microphone and one student would have a hearing piece/headphone on so she could have his voice amplified. This school also tried to save as much paper as possible so all the announcements were sent home via email and posted on the schools website.

Even though both of these schools had different technology at their hands, neither one of my CT’s had a blog or website of their own like we are learning to do. I know one of my teachers had a facebook account, but only used it for personal use.

With the technology they used I didn’t see anything out of the ordinay from what I saw growing up in my hometown schools. I still think that this technology integration is going to take some time, but once people start to realize all the benefits and how easy it is to create a blog, educators will be joining on real soon!