The primary question of this exploration is “does technology make us smarter?”. When I was originally asked this question, it made me think. I thought about it for a while that day, because it could be interpreted in two different ways. Originally, I was confident in saying that technology does not make us smarter, it only assists us in finding answers. However, the more time I spent thinking about it, I began to second guess myself. Technology can essentially give us the answer to anything in the snap of a finger. Whether it be a date, an equation, or a piece of literature, we can find and utilize it quicker than ever thanks to technology. Through the use of this technology we learn lots of things, which therefor makes us smarter.
Technology can also take us anywhere in the world. A visual aid of the landscape can be provided through map applications. For my content area, AYA history and social studies, this can be used constantly in class in order to give students a visual aid of what we are learning about. For example, if we are learning about the Battle of Gettysburg, we can put ourselves on the battlefield through google maps. Having this on the Smart Board in front of the glass can show students what it truly looks like. Scaffolding can also be prevalent in a lesson of this kind.
In the lesson that I observed for distributed cognition, technology was used in two forms. There were individual laptops used to evaluate the students’ knowledge, and there was also a Smart Board used to prompt class discussion, slides, and images. The technological pedagogical functions that were most prevalent during these were connecting, translating, and monitoring. It was very interesting to see the different impacts both of these forms of technology had on the students.
As the students entered the classroom, my corresponding teacher invited students to pick up a laptop. A classroom set of laptops were in the front of the room, in a chest with shelves for each individual laptop. The students usually use the laptops for either a test or quiz, or classroom research. Today, they were going to be using them for a quiz. I observed that students taking the quiz by sitting in the back of the room so that I could see all of their screens. There is a lockdown browser that gets set on their computers while they take a test or quiz so that they cannot browse the web. The quiz consisted of ten multiple choice questions. This was the technological pedagogical function of translating, because the students were demonstrating their knowledge from the chapter reading. They were encouraged, or forced to translate what they learned from the reading into the multiple choice questions.
When all students were done with the quiz, they were asked to return their laptops back to the crate in the front of the room. They began their lesson with a discussion about the reading they did the night before and the quiz. This was the technological pedagogical function of monitoring. My corresponding teacher was monitoring the students progress with the chapter.
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