This week I inquired about the lack of technology in my cooperating teacher's classroom at Columbia High School. When I walked in on the first day (two weeks ago) I observed that the classroom was technologically equipped with one laptop at the teacher's desk and one overhead projector (the ancient kind that uses transparencies). I was shocked, to say the least. Overhead projectors were the thing to use when I was in elementary school, but with the Smart Board craze I really did not think that overhead projectors were still in use. Before confronting my cooperating teacher, however, I explored the rest of the school and actually found a lot of Smart Boards in classrooms that housed subject areas like mathematics, science, and history. So why did it seem that nearly all of the classrooms had Smart Boards except the ones with English classes? Well, during my second visit to the school I asked my cooperating teacher and apparently the school ran out of funding to equip the English classrooms with Smart Boards.
So we are traveling back to the Stone Age! In my future observations I am going to be sure to pay special attention to how my cooperating teacher utilizes the overhead projector and gauge whether or not it is effective to student learning. Thus far, she has used it to project directions for individual and group work, as well as the results of group work. For example, students were situated into groups and given a transparency on which they were instructed to write down important aspects of a particular chapter in the novel A Tale of Two Cities. These aspects included a brief summary, character descriptions, important themes/metaphors/symbols (it was much like creating their own SparkNotes page). The groups then displayed and presented their transparencies to the class. It was effective, but just seemed like a really outdated way of doing things. It will definitely be interesting to observe how else my cooperating teacher makes use of the overhead transparency- more details to come!
It's sad that the school ran out of funding to be able to provide a smart board in your co-op teacher's class. I feel that if you are going to provide some teachers with the smart board then all of them should have them. There might be some students that will see the smart boards in one class and be so intrigued by it and love the class only to then go to a classroom without one to just get annoyed and find the class irritating. I like, however, that she has some sort of technology in her classroom that she can use, so thats good.
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