Gina Pagliaccetti Classroom Technology

All throughout my education, I have experienced the use of technology in my classrooms as an aid for teaching. One situation in which technology was used to help me learn that sticks out in my mind was during my freshman year of high school. During each year of high school, I was assigned to write a research paper in my English class. As an introductory lesson, my class was taken to the library to receive a lesson from the librarian. In each classroom in the library there was a Smart Board. The librarian began by showing the class how to look up and access books and other materials throughout the library. This entailed signing onto my high school’s website, clicking a link for the library, and using that site to search materials held in the library. She then continued to use the Smart Board in order to show us how to properly search the Internet for articles and other information we could use in our research papers. She began by signing onto the Internet using a keyboard. Throughout the lesson, the librarian allowed us to use the Smart Board by doing things such as touching a link projected onto the Smart Board in order to navigate through different sites. While most of the students were interested in the Smart Board, I felt it did not have much to do with the lesson. Aside from providing a large screen for all of the students to easily see, I do not think the Smart Board benefited the lesson. While the students did have the opportunity to search the web by touching the board, I feel the same could have been done using a projector connected to a keyboard and mouse. I do, however, feel the Smart Board is a very useful piece of technology when used in a more beneficial way. I feel in this situation it was not necessary.