Technology in the Placement

Technology in my placement has been extremely interesting to say the least. This has been due to a number of reasons, one is that there really isn’t any reliable wifi networks within the area to use. We have been thrown back into 2005 where if I actually wanted to show a simple YouTube clip I would need to disconnect the Ethernet cord from one computer and put it in to another that has the video projector. 

Besides a video projector that really doesn’t work as well as it should, there really isn’t any form of technology in the classroom. Teachers have their own personal computers to take attendance and such but even those don’t necessarily work as well as they should. Ironically, teachers are given iPads because they are apart of the Berkley school district, which I find extremely ridiculous since they don’t have any internet to do half of the functions on it.

There are about two small media centers that have about 20 computers each.  Unfortunately many of the programs don’t really work, this has to due with the fact they both have been abused and not been given updates, some are still working on the Windows 2000 operating system. Teachers have to reserve the media center ahead of time since there aren’t any mobile media carts.

What makes this placement even more interest is while there really isn’t a lot of technology, almost every student has a form of smartphone that they often use within the class. There is a policy that they can also use their cellphones within the class which makes matters even more complicated.

Given all of the complications that this placement has I am extremely excited to be there and am trying my best to work with everything given. For example, every time we have had a presentation showing the different tech tools to use, I always got extremely annoyed due to the fact that these were items that I thought I could never use in my classroom. A few weeks in however, I decided to not let the handicaps I had within my placement stop me of still trying to instill some of these really cool tools into my classroom. Instead I just need to be really creative, and I did.

I used the tech tool padlet for my 3 day teach and while I faced some problems using it, I thought it was highly successful. What I did was that I had it all preloaded before I came into class, that way I just had to use the video projector to show the presentation to the rest of the students. I was even able to show them a few videos because those were preloaded as well. I think this really gave me the boost I needed to realize that while I cant choose the level of technology I have in my classroom, I do have the choice of whether or not to have these inconveniences stop me from actually trying to be as innovative as I can.

Checkout the padlets

http://padlet.com/mnrkhalid1/it62thwy3jmd

http://padlet.com/mnrkhalid1/bgw2un1tzubz