Technology+Integration

The following short essay is about technology integration. In this essay, I touch on the importance of integrating technology in the classroom and how I hope to do so in the future.

Since our class will be looking at wikispaces next week, I decided to write my reflection on a video entitled, “Harness your students’ digital smarts” ([]). I learned several things from watching this video, but I was most impressed by the way the teacher, Vicki Davis, demonstrated how the students are able to teach a new technology to their classmates. Toward the beginning of the segment, Vicki commented, “I don’t have to be in front all the time”, and later on she admits, “they were teaching me! I literally did not know how to use Terra Form until today!” I also enjoyed hearing about how she utilizes technology to individualize instruction as well as how technology, specifically a wiki called “digiteen”, has enabled her students in rural Georgia to connect with other students around the world. In one particular project, “flat classroom”, the students study trends in informational technology as well as experience and learn about those trends with students who live in several different countries. At the end of the clip, Betty Shiver, the curriculum director for Westwoods Schools, comments, “we’re in South Georgia about as rural as you can get, but yet she has got us connected to the world. And she has got our children, who are basically rural children, with a whole new perspective of possibilities of what’s out there”.

Integrating technology in today’s classrooms is extremely important for empowering students to succeed in life beyond high school and college. By incorporating technology into the life of the classroom, the school environment will more closely resemble the world that awaits beyond campus boundaries—a world in which technology forms an integral part of the lives of a growing number of individuals. As a foreign language teacher, I am particularly drawn to the opportunities technology provides to connect learners of Spanish or another modern language with native speakers of that language. Not only does technology support the exchange of information, but the greater the extent of one’s cross-cultural understanding, the better the world’s chance for peace.