Technology in the Classroom

In my classroom I want to keep things simple.  I think people over complicate education with technology.  Most of the time its not necessary and only creates problems.  The best teachers do not use technology to teach kids and the lessons are taught hands on by talent not smart boards and whatnot.  Speaking of smartboards; talk about an overpriced unreliable messy looking chalk board.  Writing on a smartboard looks shoddy and chalk boards do the job just fine, why are we wasting our money on these things? Half the time they collect dust.  I feel like too many teachers become obsessed with powerpoint and allow their lesson to be guided by a program.  Power point lectures were rarely done correctly in my highschool and I gained nothing from seeing the teacher press the screen instead of the space bar.  Of course technology has its place, I'm a science major, I will be using technology on a daily basis.  However, technology should never replace a solid lesson.  The best teachers I've had used nothing more than a dry erase board or chalkboard.  We don't need to over develop something that already works.  Some of these technologies provide minimal benefits and instead create distractions or are relatively unreliable.  Kids don't need even more technology in a "technology based world", the following generations will be able to figure out gadgets even easier than the current.  They will go home and log onto computers or video games, they grow up with this stuff, they probably know it better than anybody; the last thing we need to worry about is our children not being exposed to enough technology.  Some technology can get kids interested but from my experience it doesn't get them interested in learning, they just play around with the tech and lose interest in the content.  I plan on familiarizing my students with current science technologies in labs and class but I plan on teaching content lessons in a much simpler way.

Audio and Visual Technology

Audio: Some good audio technologies would be audio books or recordings of lectures to put on an ipod or mp3 player.  Audio isn't very popular and it is not always the most practical in my opinion.  I think audio books may have a place but I feel like reading straight text doesn't teach kids.  Nobody wants to learn reading the text book and frankly listening to a monotone voice over read the text book isn't much better.  Of course we need textbooks and maybe when the students need to do some book studying the audio book could also be made available.  I think recordings of lectures are a great way to study too.  My brother listens to some lectures he downloaded on the internet on the way to class and I know runners who listen to lectures while they run.  I think charismatic lectures are much more effective and interesting than audio book recordings.

Video: I think a great piece of video technology is the document camera or Elmo.  Overheads are great and they get the job done but document cameras are more versatile.  For example if I need to show my students how to do something on a calculator its much easier to throw it up on the document camera.  Also for going over tests or homework it can be a very handy tool. I would just be careful not to use it too much because I think there is something good about a simple chalkboard.

About Me

My name is Jeremy Hunter.  I am an AYA science major at Bowling Green State University. My content areas are most likely going to be physics and chemistry. Ironically due to a nasty case of senioritis I failed my first class ever, senior year physics. I graduate in 2014 if I finish everything in time, I may take some extra things so who knows I could end up being here until 2015. It doesn't really matter because nobody is going to read this. Please enjoy the picture.