Technology and Teaching: Hand in Hand?

For my CI350 Assignment, I have decided to post a blog on how Entertainment and Education are starting to walk hand in hand when it comes to teaching. You see how entertainment and technology just keeps advancing further and further and further. It seems to be unstoppable. Actually, it kind of is unstoppable if you think about it. Scientists, Engineers, etc, hard at work every single second of the day to bring you the next big break in the technology buisness. It seems to be a neverending cycle. Just when you think they cannot come up with something more clever, well, they do! Just when the world was amazing with the iPod nano, there comes the iPod Touch. Same goes for cellphones, computer programs, music industries, etc. It all goes hand in hand. Now you want to bring teaching and education into the picture and let it walk along with the new big technological breaks that are occuring? Seems like madness maybe? No electronics in a classroom! No cellphones! No laptops! Well, that is all changing right before our very eyes!

In my EDF course, I had to do observastions in a public school classroom. I chose to shadow at my old high school under a very prestigious teacher honored several times for her amazing teaching skills! I felt honored to be doing my teaching observations under her and really felt that she would help me get a true grasp on teaching, one that I needed! What I got was so much more! I was utterly amazed with the amount of technology she used in her every day teaching lesson plans! I mean, this was the same exact high school I went to, with most of the same teachers and even some of the same students I roamed the halls with! Here they were getting up in the middle of class to grab their laptops and use them to type their research papers. I was amazed. I could not believe that this was happening in a classroom. When I was in high school if we would have even attempted to bring out laptops into class we would have been taken to the office, but here these students were using laptops in every day classroom assignments. I was amazed, one again. The way that the teacher intigrated the technology into the lesson plans was truly brilliant! I loved how this new teaching accompanied with techonology was unraveling right before my eyes! Then I thought about how much it was actually helping prepair the students for college and for life after high school!

When I entered into college, I was truly taken aback by some of the things we were required to do! Everything was internet based and technologically based, I was not used to this sort of thing. Here in this high school classroom, however, I watched these high school students do things that I do every day in my college classrooms. I was thinking, wow, this is truly going to help these students more than they can ever imagine! I wish that technology and entertainment would have been so closly woven when I was in high school.

It just goes to show you that anything is possible! With the way that technology and entertainment buisnesses are so rapidly advancing, it is no surprise how it could not be intigrated into a teaching classroom with the students benefits at mind. I am greatly excited to see the future of technology and teaching, because I know that it will truly be one that will blow my mind as well as everyone elses!