Technology in the classroom

Most of the technology usage I have seen so far in the classroom has been pretty minimal, barely extending past basic SmartBoard functions that could just as easily be accomplished with a projector and/or a regular chalkboard. I have seen SmartBoards used twice now for note-taking, with the teacher occasionally underlining or annotating what is already written to help in their explanation of the concept. Recently I watched one teacher explain what they would be working on in the upcoming weeks, and there were a lot of questions and confusion. So for the next section she had of that class, she used the SmartBoard to draw and label a calendar for them, and having the visual component up made it a lot clearer for this group. 

The most creative use of the SmartBoard I've seen yet was in a 7th grade inclusion classroom. For one part of the lesson, there was a series of pictures up on the board which were covered with a grid of colorful squares. When each square was tapped it would disappear, revealing part of the picture underneath it. A student was selected to come up to the board and tap a few squares, trying to guess what it was a picture of with as few taps as possible. They then had to explain how the picture related to the story the class was reading. While I did admire the kinesthetic nature of this activity, it only accommodated one student at a time and was only used about 4 times in total, which left a lot of students left out and disappointed that they didn't get to try it. 

However, I don't think technology use has to necessarily be creative and unusual to be effective. While I do think we should do more than just using SmartBoards to give notes, sometimes it's okay to keep it simple. I subbed for one English class where all of the 9th grade students had their own chromebooks, and the teacher made frequent use of Google Classroom. This period, she had left them a reading check on their current work, Romeo and Juliet, through Google Forms. The part I found most interesting was that there were different versions of it (I'm not sure if the questions themselves were different or if they were just in a different order, but I believe it was the latter), which made it more difficult for students to share answers. To me, this seemed more efficient than a paper quiz, though I would be concerned about students looking up answers. I would definitely like to make use of programs like Classroom and Forms, especially for things like exit tickets.