Technology Autobiography

Outside of the classroom, I use technology all of the time, but mostly for simple purposes such as writing papers and checking e-mail. When I am living in Charlottesville, my computer is on almost every hour of the day, every day of the week. At home, my family has not stepped up to DSL yet and so I have to deal with slow and annoying dial-up every time I want to go online. This deters me from going on the internet somewhat. Nevertheless, whether at home or UVA, I never fail to check my e-mail every day, and I usually end up checking it much more than once a day. I am also a faithful user of AOL Instant Messenger.

In school, my personal experience with technology has not been very good, although it did improve over the years. In elementary school, I had computer class once a week for about 45 minutes. The "computer room" was a very large closet with barely enough room for anyone to move around in. We worked two to a computer, mostly playing games like Oregon Trail, Word Munchers, etc. Around 6th or 7th grade, we started to focus on more practical skills such as keyboarding and some kind of weird programming (I think), but I do not remember too much about that. 8th grade was actually a good year for technology use. My class put out a weekly newsletter that we had to type and format as a newspaper. We also learned how to do PowerPoint presentations and made use of them in class.

My use of technology improved even further in high school. There was a technology sequence as part of freshman year and sophomore year that took place for about two weeks each year. We learned how to work in Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Word, but the class was rather boring and I do not think I retained a lot of the information. I also had to have .5 credits of computers in high school and so I took a class in webpage development for a semester. We used Dreamweaver, learned a lot of neat things, and created several websites. During my senior year, I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and we converted from the old-fashioned method of real cutting and pasting to using Pagemaker for layout. It was a very interesting time because neither I nor any of the other editors had ever used Pagemaker before and my teacher knew even less than we did. We all took a training class during the summer before that year, but it proved to be almost useless. We had to figure everything out on our own. Although this was difficult and a little time consuming at first, I think this was probably my best use of technology in school because it was practical, beneficial, and I learned and retained the most information from it because I had to learn it on my own. As far as integrating technology into classroom learning, besides videos, most of my teachers did not really use very much technology. There were a few exceptions, but none to single out.

I think that technology should play an important role in schools today. We are at a time when kids relate very well to computers, video games, and other electronic equipment. They get bored so easily and need almost constant stimulation. Technology can provide teachers with a way to vary activities and teaching methods and keep things interesting and fun. Technology has also made things possible that were impossible for teachers to demonstrate or show to their students in the past, such as what a cell looks like when magnified to a very high degree. Information that would have taken much effort and time to find can now be found at the drop of a hat through the internet. This can allow teachers to add a greater depth to their lesson plans. I think it is important, and will become even more important, for teachers to find ways to integrate technology into their lessons to enhance their students' learning so that they can get the most out of their educational experiences.