Educational Technology Autobiography

Educational Technology Autobiography

My experience with educational technology from K-12 to post-secondary education:

The very first form of educational technology that I encountered was the use of the overhead in the first grade. In the third grade I was moved to a gifted and talented Math class; therefore, allowing my fellow classmates and myself access to a computer lab that contained seven apple computers. Every Friday we were allotted fifteen to twenty minutes on these computers to play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. In fourth and fifth grade I continued with my gifted and talented Math programs, but was also added to gifted and talented Science and English programs. In these programs I again used the computer but this time I used the computer for puzzles (i.e. a picture of a cake on the screen and we had to click on the appropriate prompted proportions, or fractions) in Math, for games such as Word- Munchers and filling out Mad-Libs in English, and to record data in a timesheet format in Science. Furthermore, in my Math and Science classes I was asked to be able to understand how to use a simple function calculator. In addition, in my English class we often heard literature read aloud through a tape recorder, as well as seeing movies based off of the books we were reading. During my last two years of elementary school, I became familiar with the use of overheads, televisions, calculators, and computers, for educational technological purposes. Each summer, while I was in Elementary School, my mother made me practice typing, where I became very familiar with a (hateful) program called Mavis Beacon. Moreover, during the summer before I entered Middle School I opted to take a Summer Camp on computers, where I learned to ...

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...unctuation and grammar, as well as provide them with a thesaurus.

Finally, another thing on the computer that the teacher could use to enhance teaching her class, would be the use of Microsoft PowerPoint. Here if an English teacher was trying to teach her students the different types of essays, a slide-show explaining what an Expository Essay is on one slide, as well as a Cause/Effect, Definition, Comparison/Contrast, Argumentative, Literary Analysis, and a Character Analysis Essay are on different slides, would make understanding the differences between the essays much more clear to the students, than for example, verbally explaining the different types of essays. Furthermore, using programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint are attractive to the eye; consequently, the student will pay more attention to what they are learning, and essentially learn at a higher level.