Why can I not get that Daft Punk song out of my head?

I am waiting for my LCD projector that I received through donorschoose.org. I have lofty expectations that this piece of technology will somehow transform my classes. Rather than making time-consuming, resource-eating Spanish vocab flashcards, I would like to project images gathered online to draw my students into the Spanish language. I also hope to at some point host a karaoke party with Spanish music and watch video clips related to news, culture and current events from the Spanish-speaking world. I am somewhat concerned about the censure of YouTube which is an incredibly convenient resource for a teacher looking for video clips. I believe that there should be some way for at least the teachers to have access to this website.

This is the first year that I’ve made much attempt to incorporate technology into my classroom and I know I definitely haven’t taken it as far as I could and probably should be. My students all have professional gmail addresses and at the beginning of the year I assigned homework in the form of emails weekly and received a fair amount of responses. I slowly quit assigning these emails as I got caught up with different things through the semester. I know I could have taken this much farther and am hoping to start up again for the spring.

I have one class that has done several projects on the mobile laptops this semester, but that is because it is a very small class and it has been relatively manageable. I did get some great writing and power point presentations and the kids definitely worked hard and seemed to enjoy it.

As far as the students are concerned, I consider it my responsibility to teach them all of the steps involved in creating work on the computer. This includes everything from providing links to useful websites, to teaching proper formatting if typing a Word document, to teaching students how to distinguish reliable resources from unreliable resources on the web. I can’t say that I’m at the point where I have integrated all of these practices into my teaching, but then again, I’m still working on finding ways to even make technology a functional part of my class. One thing is for certain; I cannot wait around for someone else to teach my students these things.

What I want from my students is for them to learn and be engaged in my class. I see technology as the best tool I have at my disposal to hook them in. Access to technology is indeed a giant hurdle we all face; however the real hurdle is that I am also struggling with an entirely new way of teaching. Rethinking the way I teach (which also means rethinking the way I was taught) is perhaps the larger issue.