Technology Interview Reflection

Getting our technology interview questions was quite a breeze. When we went and met with our teacher she told Brooke and I that she was very knowledgeable about the technology within the school building. There is a teacher that specializes in technology, but we figured we could ask our cooperating teacher our questions and she would be able to answer them just fine. She did a great job at answering all of our questions. It was nice because we sent her all the questions via e-mail and she sent them right back to us. So then Brooke and I were able to read over them together and create our lesson plan based on what they had in the school.

What did I learn from this interview?
Some of the things that I learned through the interview questions were that, this particular teacher had a lot of technological resources available to her. Though she had a lot of these resources available to her, I did not see her use many of them in her lesson plans. She did have a set of Mac computers in her classroom, the only problem with those were that, they were very slow and so this made the students frustrated when trying to use them. None the less the students loved every opportunity they received to be able to play on the computers.

One of the questions asked if they had a network, and yes our school belonged to a network, but something interesting happened while in our field experience. For a whole week the network shut down completely, this left our cooperating teacher stranded with no lesson plans, or schedules. Everything she needed was on her computer. This definitely taught me to always have back ups!

2. How will this experience affect me as a teacher?
Having technology in the schools can affect me as the teacher in several ways. First it allows the students in my classroom to have a variety of ways to learn just one topic. I think that students need to be able to get up out of their seats and try something new and exciting, this can engage their minds in what they are learning. As a set back, planning technology rich lesson plans can create for extra preparation. Always have a back-up, you will never know when something can unexpectedly crash down on your plans. I do think that technology is a great way for students to expand their knowledge.

3. How did this experience change my thinking about technology?
After reading over this technology interview this definitely changes the way I view on how technology is being used in the classroom. I never realized how much you can do with all these new resources that are becoming available to us as teachers. Projects and overheads are things of the past, it is time to move on to bigger and better things!