Friday, February 5, 2010
Technology Integration-Reflections of a Tech Geek
Lights out. LCD projector beaming. Laptop connected. Students eagerly awaiting the promised moment. Finally, it’s here. Eight students with special needs are going to get to virtually fly to their school and then to their homes via Google Earth. The program is running. We fly onto our continent and zoom into our country…and then our state…and then…we have no internet connection. The excited faces turn to dread. It is a familiar feeling. I troubleshoot while I have them recite their Seven Continents song, but I am unable to get a connection. Our virtual field trip is suddenly cancelled. Our lesson on our global addresses turns into a social skills lesson on coping with frustration. We have to use a variety of paper maps find our homes, but no one gets to actually see their home or how it fits into the scheme of the globe. The very technology I was using to give my lesson a boost also was a bust. (Yes, the next day, I am able to pull students individually to show them the Google Earth lesson. But, at what cost? My students were confused about the lesson’s intent. About the order of the lesson. I had already given them a roadmap for where we were going and then suddenly changed it. Yes, this happens in life. But I do not wish to make this a habit in my teaching.) This led me to think: At what cost am I integrating technology? At what benefit?
I think that it is reasonable to develop solid routines for students when you are setting up technology activities or transitioning from one program to another. However, is it reasonable to always plan a backup activity for technology breakdowns? Given the amount of time it takes to create a strong tech integrated lesson and the other demands we face, how can we ensure fewer breakdowns in our technology? How can we cope when the technology does fail? Not only is it a dissappointment for the teacher, but the students are highly frustrated when the technology fails. The answer is not as simple as putting in a one-time request to HelpDesk. We will always have glitches with our technology as long as we work with dynamic, everchanging, growing, and complex systems.
| Benefits | Costs | |
| Gains student attention | Setup time | |
| Teaches students 21st century skills | Tech breakdowns | |
| Is multisensory (can be auditory, visual, and hands-on) | Takes a long time to create documents specific to class or individual student needs | |
| Adds variety and novelty (especially helpful for our students with ADD) | Technology changes quickly over time-What will we buy into next- will we be able to use what we have created now in another five years? |
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2 comments:
You have some very interesting ideas.
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