Technology: A tool of improvement

Today my husband and my sister in law gave me the most amazing present I could have wished for. Knowing that I am entering a system that is greatly influenced by technology, I have been wishing to have an Ipad for a long time, and today, I was finally surprised with one for Valentine's Day and for my coming birthday. As soon as I got it, I began to explore the immense amount of applications that this gadget has for education. First of all, I added gradebooks, whiteboards, attendance sheets, and other applications that would be fun to use to teach literature. Although I wished I could add many more, I stopped myself because I do not yet know what grade level I will be teaching. However, having this technological tool has opened a lot of possibilities for me.

                           
This is when I realized that our world is entering a new time in which whoever does not know about technology is missing out on a valuable tool. In fact, nowadays, technology has a very important role in our lives as future teachers. Almost every school is now employing the use of smart boards, MACS, Ipads and many other technological tools that will aid the teacher at engaging the students in the lesson. This week, I realized how important it really is to keep up with all of these gadgets because if not, we will be missing out on a lot of wonderful things.

Moreover, in one of my education classes, we were talking about how fast new technological gadgets are coming out to the market and how technology is getting its way into our lives, making it far more simple to do many things. For instance, back when I started college, we all had to buy books for our classes, and there was no other choice but to carry those books around all day. However, nowadays, students can buy a tablet, or an Ipad and get the books online. Every day, new books are becoming available as e-books and someday, as we predicted in my class, everyone will have the option of buying all of their books online and reading them in their Ipads or tablets. To me, this is simply amazing and wonderful for those students who take advantage of this tool.

On the other hand, like I have stated in many of my blog responses, if this tools are not used to our advantage, then we are harming ourselves. I have known of people who tell their teachers they are looking at their computers because they are reading the books or readings for the class, and in reality they are signed onto Facebook, chatting, doing other homework, and even shopping. Like anything else, technology, as helpful as it may be, needs to be used for the right reasons and at times may also become a dangerous tool for teachers. When dealing with technology, our eyes have to be really opened and always aware that our students may in fact be doing things on the computer than are not school related.