Technology in the Classroom

The use of technology in the classroom is rapidly increasing  because of how fast it is changing society. Thus we (future teachers) are now responsible to teach technology literacy. Our students will not be able to compete in the professional world if they do not know how to use technology. Thus, it is our job to incorporate technology into the classroom when it will enrich our lesson, engage our students, and improve their literacy in the technological world.The hardest part is figuring out when to integrate technology into our classrooms. I believe that technology should be incorporated into certain parts of the curriculum as enrichment assignments. I do not believe it should completely replace other forms of instruction that use books and paper. My reasoning behind this is the theory of differentiated instruction. We know that not every student has the same learning style or is at the same academic level as their classmates. Therefore technology is another outlet to provide this differentiated instruction for those students who would prefer to use it. In the classroom I’m in now for example, if the students want to know what is going on, what’s due, what they will be learning that week, the teacher uses a Google calendar to  post homework assignments and update reminders for upcoming tests. This allows the students to go online and check the calendar to help them stay organized. She also has a written calendar in the classroom on the whiteboard for students who prefer to refer to that calendar.

Technology can also be used as a background semester long project like Pixton comics. Pixton is a very reasonable online website for educators that allows students to design their comics. This would fall under the genre of a graphic narrative where the students have to work on their creativity, writing, reading, listening and speaking skills. This type of project has to be thought out by the teacher as to when they could implement it into their class, but it is a great tool to get your class working on something that makes them have to write their own storyline, create characters, and also record their voices as they read through their comic. We saw an example of this project by Professor David Shultz, the technology coordinator at the language resource center at Grand Valley State University. I would use this  comic book idea for a  semester long project which allows the students enough time to devote quality to work, but it also gives them an assignment to continuously work on so that when you have free time in class, they can always work on their comic.

As to my future classroom, depending on the level of technological support I have in my future classroom, I would use technology with my weebly account for my class. Upload helpful videos of grammatical structures or cartoons that use the vocabulary we are studying. I would also like to create a semester long project for them to do like the Pixton comics. The good thing is that in order to differentiate your instruction, you could give the option of actually drawing and making a real comic book themselves as well, if they did not want to do it online. There are many options where we can utilize technology in the classroom, but we need to take precautions as to when we implement it into our curriculum and how we will be assessing them on an activity where technology is used. We need to prepare a strong rationale for why we are using technology in that specific task, how we will assess, and what our objectives are. Technology is made to help the process of learning be more fun and more interactive!