Saturday, March 29, 2008

Technology Battle continues

I feel like my use of technology in my classroom has become slightly stagnant. The novelty has slightly worn off, and the thought continues in the back of my mind that next year I won't have any of this, so searching for more resources is in vain. There are so many other balls I'm trying to keep in the air, that something has to at least temporarily drop.
However, when I do come across a resource that I can't use now, but might be able to in the future, I'm not sure how to really organize it. Put the link and a description in a word document? Just save it to my favorites? Email it to myself? I have no idea, b/c I know that just trying to remember that it's there will never work.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

New School, New Challenges

So I took a new position for next year in my home town, and as I was walking around the high school I realized that they didn't have nearly the resources that my current school does. As if I had a challenge already- now it's going to be reversed! No data projectors, no SMART boards, I think I saw a few overhead projectors... How depressing. All the hard work I did to incorporate movie clips and videos and current technology into my class is going to be completely in vain come next year. I was thinking, how could I take what I've already learned and apply it to what I'll be doing next year? Unless I start making overheads of every Power Point slide I have in lecture notes, I don't know how I'm going to do it.
It's exciting to be in a new place, but at the same time I already see challenges. This district boasts that it provides good salaries for it's teachers. But at the same time they hardly have any of the resources that my current district is fighting to get while keeping teacher salaries stagnant. I know I don't have a family or a lot of expenses at this point in my life, but personally I'd rather see that money go towards directly helping students in the classroom. I think that this district takes the stand point that if they have high salaries, they'll have good teachers, and good teachers don't need technology to be effective. Well, maybe not... but it does much better prepare our students. Hate to say it, but it seems absolutely everything always comes back to the money...