Teaching with Technology

One of the most important lessons that I learned this semester was that activities in the classroom don't always go as planned. Ultimately, when things seem to be going wrong, you are faced with two choices: panic or improvise. Although I had been warned about this possibility by practically every professor I have this semester, for some reason I thought that if I sat agonizing over every detail in my lesson plan, I would be just fine and things would go my way. Unfortunately, life happens and then you learn for yourself.
After discussing with my cooperating teacher that I would be planning my science lesson on matter, I started Googling and raiding the shelves of "teacher stores" for ideas. Once I found a couple of helpful resources, I put together my plan of attack and explored how the students could use the features of kidspiration to tie a little technological stimulation into the lesson.
It was only after I had finished putting together my lesson that I realized kidspiration was only available to the students in the computer lab and that I would be unable to
teach my activity during their scheduled time in the lab. Consequently, I was bummed to have to change my plans because I had witnessed how much the kids had enjoyed using edheads.com on the laptops in my science circus a few weeks before (as seen in the picture above). Due to the fact that I was unimpressed with many of the webquests and websites I had found regarding the study of matter, I decided to simply incorporate technology into my lesson plan by creating a PowerPoint with a few diagrams and a couple of pictures from Flickr.
However, on the day of my lesson the overhead projector I was supposed to be hooking up to my laptop did not want to display the PowerPoint I had created. After a few frustrating attempts to troubleshoot the problem on my own, my cooperating teacher made a call to the technology instructor who was able to get everything working as I began my introduction to matter. While I was preparing to teach the lesson without my slides, I was more than happy to see the pictures flash onto the screen. The students were immediately excited by the visual aid as well. Apparently, PowerPoint is not used very often by the lower elementary teachers at my school, so my brief presentation was a nice change of pace for the students.
Overall, I felt that the lesson went very well given the minor technology glitch I ran into. However, in the future I will definitely allow for a little extra time for setup whenever my lesson plan involves the use of laptops and projectors.