Why wouldn't a teacher choose technology over other traditional methods? Technology can enhance learning, just as it has enhanced our everday lives outside the school house walls. Every day many students are spending countless hours engaged in popular technologies so you may ask WHY NOT utilize what they are familiar with and enjoy in the classroom to enhance their academic learning.
There are many challenges that I personally face when it comes to using technology in my classroom. The number one challenge is technology availabilty at home. Many of my students do not have the luxury of having computers at home, but if they do have access to them then they do not have Internet. I have used classroom blogs in the past with little success and I am thinking this was a big factor. When I do have a genius idea to incorporate it into my lessons as a final project or instead of a worksheet, then I am bogged down with teaching students the basics or to find out that the equipment isn't operating correctly. For example, I introduced my second graders to wordles through wordle.net as an activity to analyze the main character from our book of the month. After spending most of the morning getting the netbooks out and getting students logged on...I then get them to the site wordle.net and explain the assignment. By this time the kids are pumped about the project. When it came time to generate the wordles, the student netbooks didn't have Java downloaded so the students could not generate their wordles. BUMMER! The kids and I were so disappointed that A-they wasted all this time and B-It wasn't like a normal instance where I could just go download it then carry on with generating the wordle. (of course only the "adminstrators" have such rights...and thats not me, I'm just the teacher.) So needless to say, I learned the hard way that I should have made sure it worked on their computers, but I just assumed that Java would be a given as an add-on for the netbooks. Hard lesson learned....
I do feel successful at using the CPS response clickers and the CPS chalkboard to engage my lessons and enhance student learning. They enjoy these, but they have their challenges and downfalls too. I know that the kids love using the netbooks any chance we get. As frustrating as it is for me to get them out, I know its beneficial for them. One wish I have is for our school to enforce aligned curriculum and expectations for technology standards as we have for math and language arts. It would be so nice if students came to second grade actually being able to log on without the support of at teacher right by their side. (ok...I got off my soap box!)
But your right, WHY WOULDN'T YOU USE TECHNOLOGY everyday if you know this is what the next generation of students are using. We need to be experimenting with new methods in education, so that we are better able to adapt to the dynamics of our changing world. Games, blogs, simulations, and social networking are already permeating the workplace as productivity and development tools...we may be doing our students a large disservice by not intergrating these tools into their education.
