Educational Technology

As a teacher, it is essential to incorporate various forms of technology into your classroom. Technology is the basis for many jobs in today's workforce, as well as being an integral part of everyday life. It is therefore an important part of our classrooms as well. As a teacher, it is our job to prepare our students for the real world, and we cannot do this without teaching a sufficient background on today's technology.
Incorporating technology can benefit both teacher and student. For the teacher, it offers a great deal of ease. It enables ease in many areas such as grading, locating works, long-term assessment, sharing of information, and much more. It offers many benefits to students as well. It allows them to build a student portfolio which they can keep for the year, or can throughout their lives. It also allows them to acquire a lot of knowledge that they will need later in life, from taking photos on a family vacation, to creating an excel spreadsheet and graph to document business profits and much more. There are endless possibilities to the ways that students can benefit from the technology that they learn in the classroom.
Teachers can, however, also run into difficulties while teaching. One is simply the availability of technology. Often, teachers do not have access to enough technology for their entire class to use it at once. Also, if they are able to get enough technology, it may be difficult to teach to the variety of levels. Every student has differing amounts of technology background, which can range from none to expert by the upper levels. This can make it very difficult to keep all students engaged in one lesson.
This class has taught me a great deal about technology. Even the programs that I thought I knew how to use, I learned that there was so much more to each of them that I still did not know. There is a lot of valuable information from this class that I plan to use in my future. I plan to continue to use the tools that were taught in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc. I would also like to continue to use the things we learned in the SMART technology if my future school has the technology available. I would like to use blogging in my classroom as well, however the level of students would have to determine the appropriateness of this. Social bookmarking is also something that I discovered through this class that I plan to continue to use in my everyday life. It is the perfect way to maintain and organize links, as well as share them with others.