Today, you can rarely have a conversation about education without talking about technology simultaneously. Technology is improving our way of teaching and students’ ways of learning every single day and is going to continue being used in every aspect of the educational system. That sounds great, right?
Well, if you’re anything like me, it sounds a little intimidating. I have never been very tech savvy. In fact, I used to joke about how I was cursed with technology because I could never get any technological devices to work properly. I can partly thank my parents for this “technology curse.” They kept the amount of technology my siblings and I had access to at a minimum. This is mainly a result of the big social media boom that started about a decade ago. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has heard, “No one cares or wants to see what you had for lunch today!” Because of posts like that, my parents then began to believe that that’s all there was out there on social media and it made them look at technology as a whole as a useless waste of time. My siblings and I were all the last ones in our grades to get a cell phone, a facebook, and then the last ones to get smartphones. I honestly didn’t mind it, though. This lack of exposure to technology taught us that we don’t need to share every minute of our lives with random people on the internet, and it taught us to be more personal with people through face-to-face communication which is a very valuable skill to have. Eventually, I started to take on my parents’ belief that technology was just making people more lazy and had no major benefit to society.
Boy, was I wrong!
Just in the last year I have seen how much technology enhances learning in the classroom and I have seen just how useful and beneficial it is to society. Students are now able to collaborate with other students their age who live across the state, country, or even world through technology, they can practice reading or math at a pace that is right for them on personal technology devices, they can access live videos of animals in the wild that they would otherwise never be able to observe in person, and so much more!
Although I have learned a lot about technology recently, I know that I have a long way to go and a lot more to learn before I can be a digital leader. My goal for this blog is to inform educators about what technology options there are for their classrooms, and the different ways they can all be used. I’ll be learning right along with my readers as well!
So, for all of the current and prospective educators out there that are afraid to join the conversation about technology in education like I was, fear no more! This blog is here for you and together, we are going to learn and work towards becoming the best educator we can be by incorporating technology.
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