Discussion 2

I think both articles bring up some relevant points about teachers' use of technology in the classroom. I appreciate that "Examining Teacher Technology Use" attempts to actually define what technology use is, explaining that it can be broken down into different criteria and that how one person defines/explains technology use may be different for another person. Perhaps because of my training, I no longer think of e-mail, maintaining records, or just using Microsoft Word as technology use. Those are everday things for me (though I realize that they may not be for other people). When I think of technology use and the purpose of this class for me, it is to be able to learn how to integrate different and newer types of technology into my lessons. This may include technologies I use to prepare lessons and broadcast information as well as learning activities I want my students to engage in. I think this involves looking at the use of technology for practical purposes, and I think we are trying to stretch our imaginations in how we can reach and engage kids with the aid of technology. I strongly agree with this article that belief is a major factor in how and why teachers use technology in the classroom. It's something we have to value in order to use. I think this is related to the other article's findings that access to technology does not necessarily lead to teacher and student use of technology. I also think this is why there is some discrepancy in the results about new teachers' use and views towards technology. For the most part, we (new teachers) have grown up and been trained to use technology, we are confident using it, so we understand the obvious benefits it has for classroom use. We have also been trained to incorporate student-centered practices in our classrooms, perhaps furthering our value of technology's possibilities in the classroom. On the other hand, we've also had technology "mess up" on us, and we know how annoying that can be.

In the other article, I think one of the most important and realistic points it makes is that teachers lack time to implement technology in their classrooms. It's not that they don't know how to use it or that they aren't comfortable using it, it's that they have to set everything up, or wait for their students to boot up their computers, troubleshoot problems, and on occassion, quickly implement a back-up plan. Lesson planning takes a lot of time as is, but when you have to plan a back-up plan on top of your regular plans, I can imagine that it is extremely time consuming and sometimes frustrating. You may have to take away instruction time in order to "set up" the instruction time. And even if we are fortunate enough to work in schools with high access to different forms of technology, we may not have fast and easy assistance to help us when we have problems. Like most things in the classroom, I think in the end it involves a little bit of risk-taking, a lot of balancing, and time management in order to make technology use a positive part of the classroom.