My Pre-Calculus Class or The Not So Smart, Smart Board

            When I was a junior in high school I had a pre-calculus class in the "new" wing of the school. In all actuality the wing was already several years old, but, as it was the newest wing, it was called the new wing. The new wing had everything you could ask for, nice clean bathrooms, the coldest water fountains, air conditioning, and, of course, the newest technologies. My pre-calculus teacher was one of my favorite teachers and she is one of the biggest reasons that I discovered that I loved math. She was strict, but she was also passionate, intelligent, and knew exactly how to explain something to you to make you understand it.

            For example, everyday she would give us mini-quizzes to help us get better at easily recognizing trigonometric functions so that when we took tests we were less focused on what sine of 30 degrees was and more focused on what the law of sine's actually was. And often, she would have us come up to the board and explain proofs to the class so that we could better understand the concepts of the theorem. But one day, our teacher was not there, and was instead at a seminar on how to use the current technologies in the classroom. And when she came back, she was all ready to start using smart boards, tablets, etc. in the classroom and, seeing as the school put an emphasis on these technologies, she used them.

            So instead of our mini-quizzes, she would spend the first 5 minutes of the class booting up the tablet software, and syncing it to the projector. And instead of having us come up to the board we instead sat at our desks and passed the tablet around, using this to spell out steps on the smart board. If someone hit a wrong button, we would have to spend the next 2 or 3 minutes trying to figure out what went wrong, and ultimately it was frustrating for everyone involved.

            You see, my teacher did not need the technologies that the school was trying to make her implement in the classroom. All she needed was a few extra quizzes, a whiteboard, and some class participation. I think as teachers it is important for us to constantly use these experiences to make sure that we are critically analyzing not only the what but the why when implementing technologies in the classroom. We need to be asking ourselves not only, "what am I going to use?", but "why am I going to use this?". If there is no answer, it may be better simply to not utilize the technology at the present moment.