After being in the placement for a week or two, I'm starting to see some ways that technology could be a hindrance to a classroom. My mentor teacher uses technology fair amount, and she uses it for good purposes. She has played a few videos off YouTube, things like speeches of Malcolm X. She also uses a lot of multimedia, like documentaries, and will occasionally put up a webpage on the projector and read the text of that. She also occasionally uses powerpoint during a lecture.
There are pros and cons that I've seen in the classroom. The internet and videos give an unique point of view that can clearly be seen. When looking at a description of a person in history, my teacher kept saying "This is a biased viewpoint, don't accept everything it says." This is a good primary source to get an opinion on a controversial figure.
However, there are a few disadvantages that I can see. The technology takes a long time to navigate and set up. When looking for a Malcolm X speech, she loses her previous bookmark, and takes a few minutes to find a video, and then, when she plays it, it isn't what she wanted, so she looks again and finds the video. But, the searching took a few minutes of class time, and if you have many forms of multimedia in one class, you may end up uses 10 minutes of class just switching it around.
The lesson that I'm taking away from my examples, is that an effective teacher should pre-plan the set-up of technology, and that improvisation with technology can be a eater of class time.
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3 comments:
Mark,
It does sound like classroom technology use needs pretty specific planning. But I think, in the case of the YouTube videos, technology adds a bit of "real life" to the classroom. I know I would have like to have seen historic footage or photos (other than those in the text) when I was in high school. Seeing them during undergrad provided me with a much better connection to the topic.
That said, I also have seen in my classroom observations that technology can be time-consuming. For example, my mentor and I were handing out passwords for the snapgrades.net online gradebook and it seemed to take forever. And, we were even just telling orally telling the students, not showing them how to use it. (As I mentioned in Courtney's blog) I don't know that Pioneer has a wireless laptop cart.
In the end, I think technology is double-edged sword...It brings great things to the classroom, but can be very time consuming.
Mark
I think you have hit the nail on the head with technology and preparation..."Plan, plan, plan and have a plan B" and "save or suffer" are my two slogans for using technology in schools. While I believe that you should practice all of your lesson plans before teaching, technology is the most important aspect of the practice. For example, never assume sites work (just because you can review them at home does not mean the school filter will allow you access). Also, having the back-up plan is nice (hard copies of information or the website that you want to go over, because you never know when the server will go down).
As I see it, the issue is not entirely technology, but your mentor's organization. It shouldn't be too hard to open a new tab (if using Firefox) or window (if using IE) and pull up the movie in that, preserving the other windows/bookmarks/etc.
Another possibility is finding a website that will actually let you download the video rather than having to stream it. I believe that Google Video (as opposed to YouTube) will let you do this some/all of the time, and being able to play just the movie you want to play should remove the trouble of having 500 YouTube videos on Malcolm X and not being sure which one you wanted (that is, unless you accidentally download the wrong video to begin with, but that's not the technology's fault.)
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