I define technology as inventions that make tasks and self expression easier. It’s the use of our knowledge to create tools that help us achieve the things we want. My thoughts on that are: it’s all about what the inventor or user wants to achieve. Hopefully things like building a safer automobile, finding a cure for a disease, or connecting with and old classmate are the goal instead of building a bigger bomb, manufacturing an illegal drug, or stalking an ex-spouse. Technology is what we make it! Personally, I think it is more help than harm, but I acknowledge the possibility it has to harm.
I have used technology since the beginning of my education and it is hard to narrow it down to three examples. I suppose an early example that comes to mind would be the educational toys I had as a child. Speak ‘n’ Spell, See and Say, and Alphie are examples of electronic toys used to aid a child in language skills and I used all three of them. Later, I used Apple computers while working on my high school newspaper staff. We used a publishing program to arrange the layouts of our pages before sending the files via hard disk to a printing service for printing. Oncourse is my most recent example of using technology in an educational setting. While working on my undergraduate degree five years ago I used the service much the same way as I’m using it today for my current classes. It is interesting to see how much the Oncourse service has evolved since I used it before and how much easier it is now to navigate. Three basic examples of my personal use of technology would be my pickup truck, my smartphone, and my scrapbooking die-cutter. I think sometimes it’s easy to not acknowledge older inventions as technology which is why I chose to mention my truck. It has over 150,000 miles on it so I think it’s safe to say I use it often! My smartphone is my “connection to the world.” Since disconnecting my home phone service, it is the only phone line I have. So my dependency on this device has grown and it is hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have mobile phones. My last mentioned device is my die cutter. It connects to my computer and I am able to draw and create images that it will then cut out of card stock to be used as embellishments to my scrapbooks I like to make. I could always draw the image and cut it out by hand, but the die-cutter does it quicker than I could by hand which allows me more time to do other things. Also I am able to save the images on my computer to cut exact duplicates later if I ever have the need.
A time that technology enhanced my education experience would be the use of an overhead projector in my undergraduate History classes. I was never very good in History and dreaded the requirement of taking it in college. My instructor used an outline written on acetate which he projected on to a film screen at the front of the class while giving his lecture. Something about that method clicked for me. I have learned since then about the differences in the way people learn and how some people are more visual in how they learn. I definitely fall into the visual category. I’ve used that knowledge about myself to help me get better grades in other classes and it is all thanks to the overhead projector used by my instructor in my undergraduate History classes. It’s difficult to think of an example of a time technology didn’t help at all when being used for educational purposes because I feel that opinion varies dependent upon the individual. Personally, listening to the radio during art class or watching the movie “Cool Hand Luke” during my high school literature class didn’t benefit me in either class. But it may have been inspiration or a needed break for someone else in the class. I see value in using different approaches when incorporating technology with educational environments.
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