Technology In The Classroom / Classroom Ideas

    







       Technology in the classroom . . . if someone would have said this during my high school years I probably would have thought they were crazy. My high school education consisted of sitting in old desks, taking notes in a spiral notebook, and listening to the teacher lecture the whole 50 minutes. We thought it was cool that the school had an intercom to communicate with the office from the classroom. When I was in high school the only technology that we used were computers and old ones at that. I was on yearbook staff my junior and senior year and that is the only time that I used technology while I was in high school.

     Observing in a classroom setting my very first time in college, I was astonished at how much technology was used in the classroom. I observed at a new high school building under a math teacher and she used a lot of technology in the classroom. I took a lot of ideas from her classroom because the students actually engaged in the topic and it was a lot of fun for the students as well. I believe that technology is great idea in the classrooms today because this is a technology world and technology is a lot of what students use today. Using technology in the classroom would help tie together school work with the student. I found a YouTube video showing how well technology has worked in an Oklahoma teacher's science classroom:

Ideas For Technology In The Classroom

     I have a lot of ideas for technology in my classroom. First of all, each student would be able to use a laptop in the classroom. I would go over a lecture and then my students would get on the Internet to find different ways and methods of solving the same problem that I did on the board. I decided to do this because not every student learns the same way. Some like learning each problem step by step and then there are some students who want to learn a shorter way to do the problem and still come out with the correct answer. The Internet is full of different ways and methods of doing mathematical problems and my students will become well-rounded in math by learning different methods and ways of doing math.


     Another idea that I came up with for my classroom does not have a lot to do with technology as the first one. While I observed  in a classroom I saw students doing math projects. Sometimes it is very challenging to find math projects for the students to do in a specific subject area. The students in that classroom learned about Pascal's triangle and the teacher printed off patterns that the students could choose from and while working out the triangle it made a pattern. The students got to design it and color it any way that they chose. I want my classroom to not only be a lecture type class but also a well-rounded classroom where students learn by doing different things each week.

  I also have the idea of having a math fair just like a science fair. I found a great website for high school and middle school students where they can pick and choose from the list and that could be their large project for the semester. The students would be able to use the Internet, library books, videos, etc. anything that they can find that relates to their project topic. I noticed that a lot of students enjoy doing the science fair projects so why not do a math fair project? Here is the link where the students would pick a project from in their specific grade: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/Intro-Math.shtml