Technology in the classroom: article response

I enjoyed Jennie Magiera's "Redefining Instruction with Technology: Five Essential Steps." My students all have iPads this year, so I am in a similar situation. The students I teach are older -- 9th grade -- and they each have individually issued iPads, so most of them use these devices as planners, notebooks, and often textbooks.

Magiera's comments resonate with my experiences with the iPad and with technology in general. I have been teaching at Seven Hills for fourteen years. I got my first school-issued laptop at the end of the my first year. I use it daily, in lots of ways, and strive to make good and authentic use of the applications and opportunities it offers. I suspect that my technology use is middle-of-the-road: I am not phobic or without ability, but I don't live and die by electronic media and I rarely adopt a piece of technology or use software simply because I like the "whiz-bang" sound it makes. I suspect I could and should use it more, but I don't think I need to hang my head.

I do think that the best uses of technology are those that are integrated most naturally and fully into the curriculum, and sometimes to do that, we must upset the apple cart entirely, cut it up, and use it to build something different. It is difficult to embrace doing that, knowing that within a year if not a month, our "innovation" will be old news, old hat, or out of date, and we will find our efforts moot or at least ephemeral in their usefulness.

Still, I have found many ways to incorporate technology into my instruction and (more so) my assessments, ways that are better than the older, pencil-and-paper alternative. As a speaker who visited my school once noted -- I think it was Alan November and I am only loosely paraphrasing -- technology should give you less work to do, not more, i.e. it should make your life easier or your options as a teacher more easily accessible, or else you should not use it. I try to keep to that mantra.

November also pointed out that generally, our students will be more facile with computers than teachers will. I have found this to be true and liberating: so often, the kids can explain a piece of software or carry out an idea that I grasp but cannot facilitate very ably myself. I don't mind this sort of letting go. The iPads certainly lend themselves to student leadership in this sense.

One point of note in our iPad use: the English department that I am a part of has been slow to adopt or at least to mandate electronic texts. We have a variety of reasons, including availability. Plus, we love actual-factual books. I love books...and know that change is coming all the same. (I love my Kindle just as much.) It's interesting to be a part of such revolutionary times. I don't mind change, slow or fast, though I do think that change for its own sake is just that: change for its own sake rather than improvement. Call me old-fashioned.