Blog Activity #1
The following questions should be addressed in this first entry: (1) what do you hope to gain and learn by taking this class? (2) what experiences do you bring to the class from your own use of technology? (3) what kind of technology integration project would you like to work on in this class? (4) how will what you learn and do in this class connect to what you are doing in your own classroom?

1) By taking this class, I hope to gain knowledge of how to integrate technology appropiately within the classroom.  I don't use technology as much as others, and I would like to feel comfortable with technology to teach with it in the classroom.  In reference to the article summary that Sean Lancaster posted, teachers refer back to old stuff when they are unfamiliar with new technology.  I do not want to be that teacher.  Technology offers cool applications for the students to maximize their learning.

2) I don't have much knowledge with technology.  I choose not to have a smart phone or devices of the like.  I work in a hospital at this moment and have close to none experience with technology within a classroom.  I hope to integrate the skills and mindset which I use with medical charting into classroom.  I had some experience with a mathematics program called Maple in college.  This program allowed us to graph functions and equations and visually see the how that function was portrayed and interacted with others functions.  This program had to have a bit of computer programming knowledge to operate, but if this was simplified for the elementary child  to understand, I believe this tool could be incorporated into the classroom to help students solve mathematics.

3) As explained in question two, I hope to see ways that technology and math could be merged so the student who gets so frustrated with mathematics can understand what is being taught and why this area is important in real life.  However, a program of such needs to be user friendly as well.  I missed important concepts when learning maple because of frustration associated with programming the functions.  It took me twice as long to  learn the software, and thus functions that could be solved in five minutes using this software usually took 3 times longer to do by hand.  I do not want students to give up on mathematics because they could not use the program.

4) In my future classroom, I hope to explore technology and it uses to explain concepts easier and integrate the old way along with the new ways of technology. I hope to open my mind up to technology and hope the students have an open mind about trying different ways of learning.