So, if you had a million dollars what would you do? Would you invest in developing skills? Would you research? Would you fix what you have? Or would you do nothing: give it all away?

The articles from this week are proposing an interesting question and it is up to all of us future teachers to decide what new frontiers we will break into during our future in education. Throughout this semester we have repeatedly identified that technology is an invaluable resource in the classroom (like having access to a million dollars). We have clarified there are infinite ways of incorporating it into curriculum and pedagogy, and it is clearly possible for all these things to take place: but will it happen?

As future teachers, we will be preparing the students that will constitute the future of our nation and the world. We have a responsibility to those children to educate them about the world in which they will live and work. I believe right now, so many teachers are falling short of this. By not using their resources, educators are neglecting the possibility to challenge and change the education environment. I appreciated author Thomas Carroll’s idea from If We Didn’t Have the Schools We Have Today? Would We Create the Schools We Have Today, “If we start to push our thinking about what the educational system could become, we begin to get some idea of the opportunities before us and the work required to realize those possibilities.”

Technology is such a diverse tool and metaphorically we can characterize it as a million dollars. There is no limit to the ways it can be integrated into the classroom, and the skills/knowledge it can accomplish at teaching once it is present. Teachers who are not afraid to use this tool in the classroom are pushing the boundaries of modern teaching and setting the president for the rest of us to follow. But, on the other hand, those teachers who are scared (or too lazy) to “dream big” for their classroom are holding back students from achieving their learning potential and as a result limiting our future.  As the article Reinventing the Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Education pointed out, there is no way to predict the future or model how it will look, but we have the means to prepare students in the classroom for a future that will very different from the past.

From the reading this week, I was most struck by the notion that it would be possible for a 19^th century teacher to be a substitute in 21^st century classroom while a 19^th century surgeon could never perform surgery in a modern day hospital. So why have our classrooms not seen evidence of the changes in our modern society like medicine; after all, educational technology has changed just as much as medical technology.  Well in truth, I don’t know, and I consider it to be an unfortunate state of affairs that we have not evolved as such. Certainly technology can (at the least) revitalize education.

In many ways the work we have done in this class has been significant of the changes that need to take place (in a broad scale) across education. In the beginning of the semester, we identified we were re-inventing the wheel as it were. As difficult as this class was sometimes, through this course I have learned an impressive amount of material and begun to analyze education and the role of technology in the classroom. From the articles and the work we have done in this course, I know I have learned of some amazing ways I can incorporate technology into my classroom, and I am excited to have the opportunity to do so.

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