Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Technology in the classroom - Utility vs Useless

In many ways technology is nothing but a filler in the classroom, as I remember days when teachers would take us down to the computer lab almost just as a way to kill time (or at least that's how it felt), or the computers in my elementary classes were really only used on days when it was raining for playing the Oregon Trail on. It can be difficult to make a correlation for students between computers and tools, rather than computers and toys, since largely at such a young age, that's really all that they are. But as difficult as it is, it's certainly not impossible.

The first step would be to teach students the usefulness of computers or the internet, and this can be done in a couple of ways. What I was thinking, would be to assign a list of different tasks that needed to be done, and then let the students find out which program or site would be used to solve that task (such as find a web database of a specific kind, edit an image file, even how to create a word document (if they are a young enough age), and many more, in order for them to find out how wide a range of tools that a computer can possess and how easy those tools can be to access.

The second step (in my opinion) would be to closely monitor their computer use for the first few weeks at school, making guidelines for them to follow and ensuring that they stay away from specific sites (possibly like Facebook or browsing YouTube, which can become an instant distraction). By making sure that they get into an established routine of knowing that they are there for WORK, and not for play, they can start seeing computer use in a new manner.
This, to me, was the big problem many teachers had throughout my K-12 experience on computers. Often as students were working on computers, even with teachers in the class, they would find something they liked while following directions, and then stick with it the rest of class, getting deviated off the original path. For instance one time a friend and I were told to go to a site similar to "AskJeeves," but when we got there we found out we could look up other things that people were searching for, and essentially spent the rest of class time looking at those (still to this day we both remember seeing someone searching up how to buy a machine gun for a submarine, and that was over 10 years ago).

A third step to take would be to keep things new  with technology, to keep things fresh. According to the standards with technology, there is a lot of comparison between technology and creativity/versatility. If, as a teacher, you get stuck too much on one part of technology (such as falling in love with Prezi and not using anything else), then you are entirely failing in that aspect. Technology is about constant fluctuation, there are newer and betters apps/processes being thrown out into the world every day, and to be a part of it you need to be able to keep an open mind. And if you are constantly changing the way you use things in the classroom, or assign constantly-changing assignments/problems to students when it comes to the internet, they will understand this concept and be more willing to be accepting of what technology has to offer. It's not easy (as I've already found myself falling behind), but it's certainly doable, at least if teachers band together to help each other out.

To me, these are the most important parts of what a teacher needs to do to keep technology useful in the classroom. Make sure students understand the tools that are given to them, make sure they understand that when using technology, it is a time for work, not for fun, and lastly to make sure they understand that technology is constantly in shift and being "redefined," so that they can join in with this shift and even benefit from the creativity it offers. I firmly believe that technology can be a major resource for future classrooms, and not just simply a filler for students on a rainy day.

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