Previous Experiences with Tech in the Classroom

For most of the people whom I'm just meeting here, they find it quite surprising to find out that I've spent the last five years teaching in the city of Busan, South Korea. It was a great experience and it also gave me a chance to develop skills in all sorts of different kinds of technologies useful for teaching.

Specifically, I've used:

* PowerPoint - the ubiquitous presentation software. I used this quite a bit when I taught at a middle school which had large televisions in every classroom. It was an excellent tool to create a "hook" at the beginning of class as well as to engage student interest throughout. When students didn't understand a concept or a word, it was great to be able to flash up extremely large pictures to help those visual learners in the class. Also, most classes had around forty students in them! It was much easier for those kids at the back to be able to see the screen rather than anything that I could have printed out.

*Classroom Information and Practice Webpage - <http://dan1freshman.pbworks.com> - I created this extremely basic site for the course in "Freshman Conversational English" which I taught at Dong-Eui University. As you can see from the site, I stopped adding new content at the end of the first month or so because my Korean students were really busy with their other studies (I taught mostly Engineering students) and because many students "don't care about English class" (an exact quote from a student). That was a bit of disheartening experience but one that I plan to learn from.

*A Live Scribe - I used one of these great tools which had come preloaded with information from a series of story books. When I taught kindergarten students, we read along with the story and when we came to new actions or vocabulary, I was able to point the pen to the small circle next to it and *BAM!* the pen was able to tell the students the word in Korean and in English. I had the lock-down on spoken English but, man, that pen could sing wayyyy better than I could.

* Various Computer Programs and Smartboard Setups - Rarely did I find a school that had a functioning smart board much less a projector to go with it but when I did it was a GREAT tool to amp up my classrooms. With these boards, I was able to turn something as basic as learning vocabulary into a hugely fun game which had every student in the class participating. I was able to do this with off-line materials as well but the projected set-ups made everything super easy and much more interactive.


I suppose those are just the highlights and, upon reflection, I've been pretty lucky to learn just the basics about these technologies. The great thing about my upcoming tech studies is surely going to be the ability to go more in depth with the tech and also finding novel ways to use it in the classroom. I fully expect to get schooled by some youngsters when it comes to finding new ways to use technology but I'll be damned if I'm not far behind them!!