Is technology a Gimmick in your classroom?

 Now technology has been proven to be a benefit to students in a classroom but is a constant amount of technology really going to help the students or hurt them. In chapter seven article two of Edtech for the K-12 Classroom, Second Edition  they begin to discuss this. 

For almost three decades technology has been a huge part in classrooms and how a teacher is able to teach with more than just a white board or chalk board. Technology gave a new life to teaching with the use of slides, videos, and more. But since we use technology in your everyday life it begins to just become boring like everything else. 

While technology can create an amazing way for students to participate in projects easier with less resources it also make it so the students and teachers are staring at screens all day. Students will soon start to put their heads down in class like Dr. Liz Kolbs class on page 145, showing disinterest in the lesson. Dr. Liz believes that technology is a gimmick since her students were very interested in the lessons when she first converted to them on powerpoint, but after she changed all of her lessons to power point the students did not care to look at the powerpoint anymore. It wasnt a gimmick but an over use of it. Instead students should be doing different things to make sure they are staying engaged to each thing as it gives a new angle to that lesson.

For an example I'm going to use a history teacher I used to have in high school. He made a very enclusive classroom with types of learning and ways to keep our attention. For one lesson he would do a brief powerpoint on the topic, we would then watch a video that showed a sort of anamation of what happened in that time. After we learned about the topic we would be put into groups and work on activities together where we would have to reasearch people and what they did making us learn more about the individuals anyway. He did use technology but its not the only thing he relied on for us to learn the topic.

Techonolgy is an amazing tool for teaching in the classroom, but if it is over used it will just become another gimmick in the class as you try to teach and students become disinterested. Students need veriety in the classroom to make sure that whatever way they learn best is put into play for that lesson. With technology not being a new thing, we over use it in our day to day life and now with school it also has become a day to day thing so its not as interesting as it used to be for students. If we use multiple teaching routes with a single lesson we can keep part of the technology without over using it and creating a tension for learning in our classrooms.