Return to Sean's Educ 5413 Portfolio Home Page
I had a rather difficult assignment as far as technology is concerned. I am placed at Superior Middle School and we are brand new. There have been times where the new technology that the school has gotten has been great, but there have been times that have been quite trying. I think that a lot of what the school has brought in (ie the televisions with DVD and video cassette players and radio reception) have been awesome. You can also plug a computer up to the tv to display something like a PowerPoint presentation to help you teach a lesson. In that sense, the brand new state of the art televisions are great. The drawback of these were when we got them. Something went wrong in the ordering/shipping process and we didn't get them until the first quarter was almost over, which put us into late October. By this time, we had already gotten rolling without the use of televisions (in fact, up to that point, the school had one tv and one vcr). We had gotten pretty settled in without them. We have made some adjustments to try to use it, but it would have been nice to have it from the get go. The use of overhead projectors has also been spotty at best. The order forms to buy new ones wasn't placed for some reason until the end of October. My classroom is sharing a very old overhead projector with a few other classrooms, even though we get it the majority of the time. Even though these are simple uses of "technology," they certainly are technology and make my job easier when they are around and are functional. Speaking of functional, our school's brand new copy machines are horrible in terms of staying in working order. I can't tell you how many times we have had the repair personnel out to fix our copiers and then have something go wrong a day or two later. This simple task of making copies has been a royal pain in the butt. All the while, I have gotten pretty good at fixing very minor things on it and have been able to help others that might need some assistance with it, which has been somewhat gratifying. As far as the technology that everyone these days thinks about, the computers, have not been a walk in the park either. I'd say about the first two or three weeks of school, there was a virus district wide on the computers. Our school was hit pretty hard with it, so for just about all of September we could not use the computers. Since then, the computer labs have been pretty busy. We have been in the labs a couple of times for language arts to type a friendly letter and for the students' short stories. Each student also has their own id number and password. What they save while logged in to their id number will go with them on any computer in the school if not any computer that is hooked up to the school district's network (I'm assuming the latter is the case because these their id was assigned by the district and will be the same throughout high school, assuming they go to Superior High School). This is nice to eliminate floppy disks, as well as possible erasure from the hard drive if they did not have this system set up. It is similar to our AUFS accounts.It has been fun helping the students get to know the system, while getting to know it myself. We also have laptops available for check out by the cart for the classrooms to use. They are on wireless internet connections, but the wireless only works in certain parts of the school. In a way it is nice, but it can also be a pain trying to find an area to connect to the network. Because of our shortcomings with technology, I have improvised a little bit. I have obtained a worksheet that looks like an Inspiration map and have given it to the students to use for their short stories (more in Inspiration reflection). I have also developed a PowerPoint presentation for one of my math lessons. So even though our short comings have greatly outweighed our successes, we have made due with what we have had. It has been a pleasurable experience in the fact that I have learned what can go wrong and I can try to change, while on somewhat of a minor level, what goes on and how I teach.