Week 14

This week I have recognized that I have some serious learning to do about technology. My partner and I did our lessons for our classroom. Two of our lessons were technology enriched, while the other three involved just a basic use of a promethean. I learned something very valuable while we were doing these two lessons. I definitely need to work on basic troubleshooting with computers.
For one of our lessons, we created a virtual museum using power point. We linked different slides within the power point to each other in order to allow the students to navigate through this power point file. They were able to choose and click on any picture that was hanging on a wall and that would lead you to a slide with information about that person or pictures. I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with such a program, however when there were some basic problems with getting the program to work properly for these students, I didn’t have much of an idea of what to do. The computers in this classroom are all MAC’s and I typically use PC’s. I am not as good with MAC’s because I am not quite as comfortable. I see the importance of being able to work with all sorts of programs, and computers in order to help students advance technologically without worrying about taking time out so that you can fix your computer errors.
We were also able to use the Promethean this week. It seems like one good aspect about learning how to use a promethean as a teacher, is that it takes you back to learning how to write the letters of the alphabet. It was so difficult at first to write just our basic letters. I see that this board is a great tool in a classroom as our teacher uses It quite often, however if you don’t understand how to work it, it can really cut into important instructional time.
One last thing that I would like to talk about pertaining to the classroom and the teacher that I have been able to observe is that this teacher is one of the lucky teachers that is able to have a technology rich classroom. She has mentioned a few times that the reason she gets these resources is because she has taken extra classes and has received extra training in the use of technology. When I am a teacher, I will be eager to do any work that will provide me with the opportunity to have such resources.