Integration of Technology in My Classroom

Technology has been a major part of many of my classrooms. After thinking back to many of those experiences I think that one experience where technology made the most impact on my learning was in a college history course that dealt with U.S. history from 1912 to about 1980s. Past history courses from high school, never really excited me or made me want to learn. I feel the reason for this was a lot of my learning was text book based and I also did a lot of teaching myself the material for the course from the textbook and from the Internet. Technology was used in the high school history course but it mostly was over heads on a projector that the teacher would go over word for word and have the students take notes. However, once I enrolled in the U.S. history course at Towson my thought on History changed forever. The class was made up of college students from all different majors and there were about 35-40 students in the class. The professor integrated many different types of technology into his classroom teaching. The different types of technology included PowerPoint presentations, video clips from YouTube, video clips from actual movies, podcast, recordings of famous (historical) people talking and famous speeches, and pictures of different art from the time period we were studying. The way that the professor taught was very different than I was used to, because I was enthralled with the material and so fascinated, and I couldn't help but pay attention. His lessons never had the students staring at one same type of media for a long period of time. For example, for a lesson he would have a PowerPoint set up and within the PowerPoint he set up links that would take the class to a podcast, or a video clip, or he would show us part of a movie, or take us to an art gallery online. He changed my thoughts on just a plain PowerPoint presentation with just words, and opened my thoughts to PowerPoint that include links, and sounds, and many pictures. What my professor did with the technology in the classroom allowed me to really relate to the material and internalize the information because I was able to create memories based on the technology used that day. Because I was able to internalize all the information from the course I feel that all the effort and time that the professor put into his lessons was well worth it for the students, at least I know it was for me. I don't feel that I would have done as well as I did in the course if so many different technologies were not used.