Final Blog Post

My Technology Inventory Plan cited that I would use the automatic live stock exchange in order to teach students about supply and demand.
We have successfully implemented this lesson fairly recently in my economics class. Students enjoyed first "buying" stock, and then graphing what's happened to their stock over the past few weeks. As we move more into the curriculum and they develop vocabulary, what the graphs mean makes more sense to them.
Looking at Grapplings Technology and Learning Spectrum, I would say this activity falls maybe somewhere between adapting uses and transforming uses. This activity falls towards the adapting uses because it was somewhat teacher centered- the graphs were on the one teacher computer and projector. In addition, it was interesting, but we still could have taught our curriculum without using live stock, and our learning and assessment practices were still the same.
However, this is also like a transforming use because my team teacher and I used these graphs as the sole basis and examples of teaching the curriculum to our students. We had no idea whether our live "example" would rise or fall, and based what we taught based off of what happened. We used the technology to construct our meaning about economics and the stock exchange. The students in essence created their own learning experience by "buying" or "selling" stock, and voting on who's company to "invest" in.

Technology as a Crutch?

Now that technology has become more and more a part of our everyday goings-on in the classroom, I wonder what purpose it truly serves. There are times when I'm overwhelmed and stressed out and find a website that works with what I'm teaching and I just think "Yea, we can just do this for today." How good of a decision is that really? Is that the easy way out and not at all what technology was intended to be used in the classroom for?
I know that deep down it should be a way to revoluntionize and enhance current teaching- not replace it. It should make us better teachers- not lazier ones.
Does every teacher face this dilemma from time to time?
At the same time, I know I'm going to seriously be downscaling in the technology department at my new school district. With all of these resources at my hands currently I want to take as much of it with me. Does that mean I print out as many sites as I can find and make overheads of them? Just the thought of working with an overhead with those dreaded markers again with sheets flying everywhere- I'm dreading it. Maybe things will up-scale before I get there in August. I doubt it... It's been such a struggle this year to accomodate my teaching life to having more techonology it will be hard to reverse the process again.
But good teachers don't care what they have to teach with, right?