Technology in the classroom

Hi all,

I'm Megan, a senior at JSC currently student teaching in a kindergarten classroom. Something that has been on my mind quite often these past few weeks is the idea of using technology in the classroom. Many of our kindergarteners came into school this year knowing very few letters, but knowing every trick to using a tablet! Technology is a hot topic these days, especially with kids, and as it is becoming an ever-increasing part of our daily lives, it's no wonder why schools want to incorporate it into their curricula. But as we all know from the last couple of weeks in our seminar courses, sometimes technology does not always work as well as we hope it will...which leads me to wonder, when is it appropriate to use technology in the classroom, and at one point does it become more cumbersome than useful?

In our kindergarten classroom, we admittedly do not use a great deal of technology. We share a classroom set of iPads with the class next to us, and we have a Smart Board on our wall, but we rarely use these things. We typically give our students hands-on activities and projects -- paper worksheets, crafts, manipulatives, and so on. On the few occasions that we have used some form of tech, such as the Smart Board, it has tended not to work as well as we hoped it would. In a class of rambunctious elementary-age kids, something as simple as accidentally dragging the written numbers on the Smart Board too far and making them go flying across the screen can momentarily derail the lesson being taught. Add in a slow computer, near-constant pop-ups requesting updates, teachers or students not fully understanding how to work the technology in the first place, and it seems almost as if the lesson would be easier on a regular white/chalk board. It is hard to teach a lesson (especially if some students are really struggling with a concept) when the tools you are using to teach it are not working properly!

I have not included much technology into the lessons I have planned up to this point. I would like to consider adding more, especially for my unit, but I want to think long and hard about when and where it would be the most beneficial and relevant for my students to use -- as opposed to adding in technology just for the sake of including it. I want to make sure that the activities I am using it for would be made better by using some sort of tech -- something that is relevant to the lesson and adds to it, rather than makes it a burden to teach. I know part of this lies in knowing how to work the tech itself, but even when understanding how to use it, it can take away from the lesson to spend a couple minutes clicking on buttons just to erase something on the Smart Board!

I don't mean to sound totally anti-tech, because I am not at all! But as a student myself, I have had far too many classes that have turned towards technology for every purpose, only to have it end up not working and wasting time that should be spent learning. 

I was curious how others integrated the use of technology into their classrooms. What kinds of things do you think about when planning a lesson using technology? What do you use it for (teaching lessons, playing educational games, reading, assessments, etc.)?

[Also, I came across another blog post discussing some ways to integrate tech into read-alouds, if anyone is interested! As someone who loves reading to her students, I thought these ideas might be a good way to introduce some tech into our class at some point.]