Week #11 - Field Experience - Technology in the Classroom 2

I have to say that attempting to incorporate technology using our Digital Story and Power Point during 2 different lessons the 1st week of field, did not go well. Our Digital Story wouldn't play on our cooperating teacher's Mac. It did the same thing it did on Doc Water's Mac when I tried to play it on hers. Unfortunately, I didn't watch close enough when she got it to play on hers to see what she needed to download to get it to play. We dealt with it and were able to get the sound and manually click through the pictures. Unfortunately, it just didn't have the same affect. For the next lesson we had planned to use a Power Point to visually illustrate symbols of different relgions to introduce the students to the main part of the lesson. This time, I did bring my own laptop, however it was very slow AND we had to figure out how to get it hooked up to the projector which took a while. So, despite the plan to use it as an introduction to our lesson, it wasn't ready until the middle. We did end up using it, but again, it was unfortunate that it didn't work as planned.

We are planning a lesson in which we are hoping will be tech-rich, disaster and glitch-free. I contacted Axel to get a better idea of what tech-rich might be after learning that the classroom computers which we were hoping to use to incorporate a web-quest do not have internet. In his email response he said that when he grades our lesson plans he is just looking that we used the backwards design and will not be grading it based on whether or not there is technology present. I AM SO CONFUSED about this. From what I understood from Doc Waters, she is not grading our lesson plans either. So, is it necessary to include more technology than what we have used? And does anybody care if we use technology? Just kidding! I know it's important, I am just really confused since it seems none of our teachers know what the requirement for those tech-rich lesson plans are and the teachers who receive our lesson plans are looking for other qualities that don't include technology. Despite the confusion, I am going to press on and seek ways to use technology that is available, (which won't include internet). I have an idea of showing an educational movie clip on the ancient civilization each group will be working on. Then, they will rotate to a different station where they will use that info to do an art project, write a Diamonte Poem on the civilization they are studying, and then type it up using a word processing program on the class computer. Hopefully it will work out as planned. I would like to have at least 1 positive teaching experience using technology.

Despite our own mishaps with technology we planned to use, I have seen an additional use of technology not mentioned in the previous post. Today, 2 students who are reading quite below grade level went with me into a seperate room. They use a reading program that includes an audio CD which they listen to using a CD player. The teacher had the students listen to the story 1st so they could hear good reading. Then he had them listen again and read along. Next, he had them read aloud to me without the CD player. I thought this was great use of technology...(where the brand or type doesn't make a difference! - ha!)