My Technology Experience in the Classroom

If my lack of aptitude for technology didn't already give it away, my experience with integrating technology into school, was not very successful. In elementary school, computers were sparse and used for playing, rather than learning.  I can remember being in fourth grade thinking that being able to use the computers was THE COOLEST thing, reserved for the students who did well and finished early.  The extent of its educational purpose was teaching students how to type, so we could transform handwritten assignments to typed ones.

  In middle school, we were introduced to laptops, but we only ever used them for the standard visit-this-website-and-do-some-research or type-up-this-paper assignments. In this school, there was a whole room for computers, rather than just one computer per room, but the computers were still mainly used for the same purpose: typing.  There was some very basic training in the standard Microsoft office applications, but nothing too wild or fancy.  There is not much I remember about the one computer class I had to take in middle school (a 5^th grade level class). The thing I remember the most is that everyone was excited to sit in the “wheely-chairs” for a whole class period.  The lab was mostly just used for that one class and the remaining grades (6^th, 7^th and 8^th) occasionally used laptops which were brought to classrooms in a large cart which was charmingly named the ”COW” which I believe stood for computers-on-wheels.

High school was similar in that only one basic skills course was required and then students could pick another computer-oriented course as an elective.  The difference between my high school and middle school computer experience was the number of classes offered. Since I was the type to shy away from technology rather than embrace it, I only ever took the basic level course and then a “Graphic Arts” course to fill the other computer-elective requirement. 

As a future educator, I hope to be able to apply technology to my lessons in an easy productive, relevant way.  I want to be able to offer students multiple resources to help them learn and discover new things. I want students to be able to use technology for more than just typing up papers and looking up facts. Teaching music is a lot about creating and exploring and I hope to be able to incorporate technology into my lessons in the same way.