Unused Technology in the classroom.

          Over the last few Months I have been doing my fieldwork at the FR****** School in K*****, New Jersey. It has been quite a unique and informative experience observing the music teacher there. I witnessed a community that was very different from the one I grew up in. Over the past two months the Ricksbury School really welcomed me into their community, and because of this I was able to form educational relationships with both faculty and students. I say educational because I was able to learn a lot from both the faculty and the students. From their strengths and successes, and from their faults and failures, I was able to reflect on them in hopes of finding my own teaching style. I was also able to see what strategies and styles were successful with the students and their varying learning abilities.

         My co-op helped make my experience a truly educational one. He was extremely helpful, and I learned a lot from both his strengths and weaknesses.  His weakness being his understanding, and utilization of technology in general. There was not a single day where he didn't ask me to help him do something on his computer. He was always yelling at his computer, and manually restarting it 5-7 times a day. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to be a very new, and high-end desktop. There is a computer in the classroom, which is connected to a overhead-projector and a sound system. Unfortunately, he never once utilized it. I asked him about why he doesn't use the computer, audio system, or projector for his classes, he said that it's more trouble than its worth. Just because my co-op does not use these technologies does not necessarily mean that he's a bad/ lazy teacher. Its that he doesn't really know how to use them, and that he doesn't have any patents for them when using them. Most technologies require you to explore them on your own time before you can use them to their full potential. I think that all teachers should attend a constructive technology workshop every year where the teachers work with professional IT people, and with their co-educators; to figure out how to not only use the technologies available in the school, but also how to effectively and efficiently teach with them in the classroom.