Technology

As I observed many science classrooms, I noticed that the use of technology is often limited to the teacher who uses it to input grades, take attendance, or show a video/PowerPoint. Students often do not have the opportunity to take advantage of technology on a frequent basis except for projects that may occur 1-4 times a year. Although students should excel in technology because it has cost schools and districts a lot of money to implement it, it is still a tool that is often ignore and not focus on. There needs to be a new way to implement technology so that more students will have at least the basis background on using technology.

Online classes

Constructing a class first online may be difficult because a teacher would have to learn how to input and design the class site. Teaching content online would be very hard and boring for certain subject, such as chemistry or physics because there would be the missing component of experiments and the opportunity to ask questions and receive help or tutoring from a teacher. I think that teaching content online would definitely involve more work and the constant checking back and forward to see if something works or to answer questions that students have all the time since online learning would be 24/7 makes it hard sometime to respond in a timely manner.

Homework Policy

I attended staff development day at my high school a few weeks ago and I finally realize how complex the school system is today. We talked about homework policy and how there are times when you can't assign homework over extended holiday breaks which I found interesting because I had so much homework assigned as a high school student during breaks. Furthermore, as teachers we are required to create a survey to gauge how much time students are spending on homework and whether they found the assignment valuable. This survey is suppose to be done either every week or biweekly and needs to be tally and saved. I found this very interesting because I have never heard anything like this before.

Classroom Experience in Technology

As I walked around the classroom to help students with nomenclature, I noticed that one of the primarily struggle most students have is the inability to understand the common factor or how to balance something out. Even during after school tutoring, I am surprised by how much students are afraid to ask questions of teachers or even at times to take advantage of free tutoring when they are struggling to understand something.

Even though technology plays a huge role in society and our own daily lives' because I believe we all check our emails every day, students still do not take advantage of it. I recall a few weeks ago almost all of my students had no idea what excel or powerpoint presentation was. I think the reason for this is that although there are so many available application and technology now, most students cannot take advantage of them until they are taught by their parents, peers, or teachers. For example, I believe that students understand how to use Microsoft word to only an extent because they need to type up an essay or something, but I am amaze how much they still do not know about it, such as adding page numbers or to add in a header/footer.