Chapter 10: Promoting Success for All Students Through Technology

1. The chapter starts off by saying something very powerful that teachers deal with on a daily basis, there is not enough time in a day or in a school year to help every single individual student. Many classrooms are filled with students who need individual help, but one teacher a lone cannot provide this for them. The text states, "teacher must make difficult choices about which students to help and for how long before moving onto the next student or the next topic" (pg 276). This is something I go through everyday as a high school teacher, because I alone have 140 students that I see every single day in all of my 6 classes. I cannot possibly help them all. That's where technology comes in. There are so many programs out there that individualize themselves to meet the needs of each students. In my old school where I taught we used READ 140. It was a program that helped students become better reader. The program began with giving the students a reading test that was followed by questions, as they moved on through the test it became easier or harder based on their abilities. The students would go to the computer lab and work on the program during their free time, their lunch, or after school, some even worked on it at home. As they became stronger readers, the levels moved up. I would try and take them to the computer lab once a week to work on the program. Overall, technology can be helpful in many cases when one teacher cannot help all students. Do you believe it is a good idea to use technology alone to help some students learn skills they need? What programs does your school implement? 

2. The chapter gave some very shocking statistics, that when I stopped and thought about it were evident in all classroom, especially in urban schools like the one I work in. Spanish is the language most frequently spoken in the USA, even when you call a 1800 number they tell you to press ONE for Spanish and TWO for English. I always get confused when I hear this. Since 1979-2004, the number of children speaking English with difficulty increased 114%. The sad part is that many of these students are born in the USA but grow up with parents who do not speak English properly (or at all) and in neighborhoods where they communicate in their L1. How can schools help all of these ESL students? Is there some sort of technology that can be implemented? What are some ways your school is helping the ESL students?

3. I found the debate on calculators interesting in the chapter. I always actually had this debate with myself, are calculators more harmful or helpful to students? Calculators are great to solve problems that cannot be physically solved by hand, but, they can also cause a person to be lazy. Yesterday, in my college class, the teacher put up a math problem that included multiplying fractions. Everyone reached for their calculators, and it was sad because the problem was not even difficult (nor did he say to solve it, he asked which one do we think is larger). It made me think, is all this technology helping students in some cases or harming them and preventing them from using their own intelligence?