Chapter Ten

Objective:

Describe teachers' thinking processes as they consider emerging technologies for educational use.

Question:

For all the good things which come out of technology, how come we do not continue to use past methods which work just as well if not better? This question is directly connected to calculators. American students have been using calculators more and more and it has come to the point where kids my age can not even do simple arithmetic at a grocery store for change. This is because if you get a TI-83 which is used in most high-school classes you do not need to know how to multiply or divide like you learned while in elementary school (third grade I believe). As well as forgetting these important methods a student can write the formulas into to the calculator and save it. While Asian cultures use ____ (I was not able to find the name of the tool used) which ensures the student knows how to multiply extremely well and can do it at an efficient speed.

Connection to my teaching:

With all the breakthroughs we as teachers need to look at what is better than past methods or how to integrate past and present together. A simple example is a dictionary while when we were younger and computers were not your typical house hold appliance as they are today; a child had to look up words in the dictionary while today you can simply go on a computer and just type the word in and in five seconds you have read your definition. In the seventh grade class I help teach one of the students did not know what a word meant so I had them look it up and it must have taken them five minutes to find the word. While using a computer is a nice and efficient way to solve many of life's problems today we must ensure students learn basic arithmetic and how to use a dictionary properly in order to keep up with other countries who hold their history on a higher level.