Technology In the Classroom

I am really excited to start this class because I realize that as we are in the program not only our end of program assignment is electronic, our students will be electronic. I am amazed by my little sister who is seven. She can play games for fun and learn important facts on the internet. I remember I played a game at home when I was in fifth grade the game was called Jumpstart Fifth Grade. I put the knowledge I learned from that to good use. For example, in the game you had to move the mouse to stack boxes on top of each other or add fractions to make drinks and I thought that was really innovative! I was really suprised that when my sister who is seven, her game that she likes to play on the internet already does fractions and she is in second grade!!! So my thoughts of putting technology in the classroom is that it needs to be available. In my sisters school their second grade teachers wrote a grant so they were able to have two computer carts with laptops. So when they are doing math they connect on to a program they have on their laptop and add fraction pizza pies together or they can read a story that is on their laptop. The interesting thing about the way her teacher inplements it is that they mostly just use it for a reward. I think that that is wrong. They are rewarded by getting to use the laptops when I think they should be more integrated in the classroom. The sad thing I think is that they are used to having this technology now and when they hit third grade it is lost.