Tech+Integration

[|A school grows it's own teachers] High Tech, Higher Learning: A School Grows Its Own Teachers I can definitely say that the video selection was outstanding! I'm an environmental science major and aspire to teach Earth Science. I’ve done one of my observation requirements at Lakewood High School and I must say that Lakewood "has it going on" in terms of technology use. Anything and everything that a teacher needs to be successful is available: Smart boards, Internet access, projection screens, teacher websites etc. The teacher doesn't need to draw a picture of various fault types on the board; they can show a CD-ROM of illustrations and video clips of actual locations of these fault types. At one point of the class, my cooperating teacher assigned a project that required the students to use a USGS site to find the location of the epicenter of an earthquake. The students were expected to know how to use various programs on a computer such as PowerPoint and Excel, not to mention the skill of "surfing the Web" for information. Considering the fact that most of the freshman students had cell phones and most of the cell phones had Internet capability, I believe that it would be foolish for a teacher not to utilize this technology to their advantage. I personalize this experience to my own experiences. After I graduated from high school in 1995, I went to UNC (Greeley... not Carolina) and my first College Statistics class did not allow the students to use graphing calculators. The reason was simple; the technology the graphing calculator had meant that the course had to get changed. Instead of spending a month learning how to derive that standard deviation the use of the graphing calculator could do it in a week. The point of my story is that teaching with technology requires the education system to change for the tools that are available. That's scary for current and future teachers; we've never seen it done. We know, because we observed the traditional way of teaching; lectures, worksheets, and homework. As a future teacher I acknowledge that I need to look for all the ways that I can incorporate more realistic and practical ways to teach my students.