What have you learned about the use of technology in the process of instructional delivery?

The use of technology in the process of instructional delivery is very time consuming. I learned this through my own experience and through the experience of my future colleagues. Last term, I worked with a teacher by the name of Mrs. Butts. She had a cute class of third graders. The room was set up in a standard way with the students in sitting in columns facing the board. The actual board space was very limited; instead the Smart Board monopolized the space of the now traditional white board (a board that is used with erasable markers as a substitute for the chalk and blackboard). The Smart Board was a tech geek’s dream. The board is connected to the teacher’s computer and can be used as a projector, an over-head projector, and the students can even write on it, much like a white board, or even a chalk board. Mrs. Butts showed me a few of the features available to the students with the Smart Board, like being able to set up worksheets on the Smart Board and having the students fill them out together as a class, before being handed the hardcopy of it. Since the Smart Board is connected to the teacher’s computer, the teacher can pull up websites to display on the Smart Board if his/her computer has internet capabilities. The Smart Board takes interaction to a whole new level, with different interactive activities for the student. But although this is all very appealing, Mrs. Butts remarked that this technology is still quite new and that many times there aren’t enough resources out there to implement the use of the Smart Board appropriately. She spent many a day’s sitting at her computer desk after school was let out trying to figure out how best to set up activities incorporating the Smart Board, something that was quite time consuming. She even mentioned that sometimes certain teachers won’t even use the board because they are very set in their ways, or are not technologically savvy, or don’t have the time to set up the activities. The last one is quite true for me. I don’t own a computer. And find it difficult at times to get a hold of one to be able to do my work on. With the different requirements and programs, I never know if I’ll be able to open the assignment that I was last working on. Or if I am able to open it if it will appear formatted the way I last left it. The technology aspect of it doesn’t bother me one bit, I grew up around this stuff. But the time it consumes to incorporate technology, well, that is my down fall. Technology is a wonderful thing, if you have the means and time to use it.