After reading the article "Let's Stop Talking about Teaching with Technology, and Start Talking about Teaching" by Krista Moroder my first response would be to disagree with her fact "Most teachers don't care about technology." Teachers do care about technology. They just want to make sure they get the best training and that it is worthwhile for them to use in their classroom. Also time is always the biggest battle to overcome for most educators. People are always complaining about not having enough time to do it well. However if we are trained correctly all the pieces should fit together. If I am being trained in something that I won't use in my classroom I may not tune in as well at the technology workshop, but if it is something I could take back to my classroom and use immediately I would be very attentive.
As I continued to read the article I did agree with many of the author's points. It is very important to create "authentic learning experiences." To create an environment like that teachers need to have the best training and professional development. There are times in our district that the plan is to introduce a new technology topic and let us play around with it on our laptop, iPads, or Smartboard. However the best laid plans sometime do not always work. The time allotted for these topics are way too short and we all start to get frustrated and never want to use it in our classroom if we can't figure it out. Teachers end up throwing the papers on the shelf and never looking at it until a much later date. Then there are times that technology doesn't work for our trainers. I am sure that they are frustrated as well. Technology is ever changing and this is something that we all have to get use to.
I do like how the author set up two scenarios to show how teaching and technology could work in the classroom. I will try even more this year to be a more effective and more efficient teacher.
This course has definitely introduced me to different technology pieces that I have never worked with before. I look forward to using some of the lessons that we learned in this course in my classroom this year. I will continue to use Google docs as a way to communicate with parents and have them sign up for different events in my classroom. I will try to use VoiceThread as a culminating project for my students to share their work with their parents. I also would like to propose Google Hangouts or something similar for my colleagues to collaborate or share things without having to travel across the entire district. This would save everyone a lot of time. I think creating a blog would be another great tool for communicating with parents. The parents would be able to find out the different things that we do in our class each week.
