Reflection #1

My cooperating class is in a large school. They are in a district that has money. The classrooms are all stocked with brand new technology. My third grade class has two teacher computers, four student computers, an interactive board, and a document reader just to name a few. I think this is so amazing!

However, I don't see it being used! This frustrates me. My teacher uses the document camera quite a bit and will at times use the projector to post class rules or on task behavior expectations...but that's it. I feel like there is so much teaching and learning that can be done by using these resources. What is hard is that it takes up so much time to try to incorporate these pieces of technology into lessons. Designing a lesson plan on the interactive board takes a lot of effort.

The other week the math lesson was on elapsed time. My cooperating teacher and I could not figure out why the students were having such a hard time learning this concept. Now that I am thinking about it, I can see how using the interactive board would have been so helpful! We could have had the students go up to the board and actually play with a clock to see the change in time. They used little clocks at their tables but it was confusing to them. The students were having trouble figuring out where the hour hand should be when the minute hand moves...that it doesn't always stay pointing to the hour.

I hope that in the future I am able to be in a class that has all of these resources. That being said, I want to make sure that I am using them. I feel like there is this great opportunity that is currently going under utilized in my classroom in particular. Hopefully this is something that will change as the school year goes on. The longer that these interactive boards are in classrooms, there will be more information and lessons available. It's too bad that these great tools take up so much time to get going with them.