When I consider the use of technology in my past classroom experience, I found that for the most part, it was more integrated into my college courses than it was in my primary and secondary school experiences. I do remember that many of my teachers in both middle and high school liked to use movies and music to demonstrate a concept, show an adaptation of the novel we were studying, or to give us a visual sense of time and place. I found that dependent on the teacher, this use of technology was either highly inventive on one extreme or it was used as a time filler where we just filled in a ditto of plot questions. One teacher who, however, did a nice job of integrating film into the classroom was an English teacher who had us watch three different versions of the “to be or not to be” soliloque from Hamlet. Each version was a completely different interpretation of the same source material and from there we were able to see how interpretation and bias can shape the meaning of a scene. It solidified those concepts and brought about a great class discussion. I think she used the film clips in a meaningful way; however, I think that she could have taken it a step further by having us read political journalism versus political blogs where we could recognize bias as well as various modes of writing.
Even though technology, especially Blackboard and blogging, was a part of my college courses; I would say that technology was not used often enough. And other times when technology was used frequently, it usually came in the form of a verbose PowerPoint presentation as a reiteration of the lecture points.
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