Ch. 11 Audiovisuals in the classroom

There are several different types of teachers and several different types of learners in the world.  Two ways that students learn quite a bit from is through seeing things and hearing things.   Teachers need to take advantage of this in the classroom and try to do different things in order for students to get the most out of their class as possible.  Our teaching and learning with technology book, mentions that one traditional audio device to use in the classroom is a cassette.  One way that I could use a cassette in my classroom would be to come up with songs for different math formula's and have my students sing repeat and sing along with the tape in order to memorize several different formulas.  If I wanted to use an emerging audio technology in my classroom for songs, then I could bring in an Ipod with the recorded songs and still have them listen to it through a speaker.  I could also play math formula songs off of YouTube.  This would be both an audio and a visual technology, although according to the book, there are some schools that have banned youtube.  Probably a better visual emerging technology mentioned in the book is the use of digital projectors.  These would probably be the easiest things to use in the classroom because you could always use them for an interactive board or have a camera set up to show students on a larger screen what exactly you are writing down for work on a problem.  I hope tha someday I do not end up having to use a traditional projector in my classroom.  Although it wouldn't be hard and I could have students put there work onto it, there just isn't that much space on one and you have to wipe them clean when you're finished instead of just pressing a delete button. 

Ch. 6 Using Digital Technology

To start off, I want to acknowledge that I believe it is not necessary for a classroom to have technology in order for students to get a good education.  Clearly if that were true then nobody would have ever learned anything up to this point in history and to be frank, we wouldn't be learning right now either because the world isn't technologically advanced as it will be someday in the future.  As far as how I intend to run things in my classroom, I do hope that I get the opportunity to teach with and some form of interactive whiteboard and if I end up teaching geometry there are definitely some cool programs out there that would come in handy.  I know that even if the school I end up at doesn't have the money for these kinds of technologies that I will have a calculator and a projector of some kind.  Maybe I will even be able to hook up my calculators to a television set for the class to look at.  Overall I would prefer to teach with more digital technology in the classroom because there are just some things that are a lot easier to do on a program than by hand.  For me, one of those things would be using a compass to make angles and shapes with.  I can just never seem to keep the compass the right size but a computer program would have to troubles at all keeping an object the same size.