ABC

Growing up in this era I am one of the students who witnessed a change of a music room into a computer lab and many more computer related switches, such as IWB's beginning to be installed into classrooms. I have seen some horrible uses of tech, but also several great ones. Coming from Grande Cache, a small VERY rural community that was super secluded... ( 180 Km's to the next town) we used technology for interaction. 3V conferences were a way of expressing information to fellow classmates and myself, as sometimes teachers were not availble for certain subjects. We basically were "Skyping" or "Facetiming" before it was cool. We had conferences with places like the Telus world of Science and museums from Canada and the US. We also sometimes conferenced with the classrooms from Jasper, and had ePenPals. This was a case of using technology correctly. It would have been considered redefiniton in the SAMR model at the time as this was a brand new and never seen before idea. If used today it wouldn't be in this category as it isn't a brand new idea with Facetime and Webcams being a now regular thing. A lot has changed in ten years. From personal experience I would say a bad use of tech within schools was the waisted time we spent on the internet for "free play." We enjoyed it but it was never educational. I now know of several websites with games that have a true purpose and are educational. Within the TCK section of TPACK I believe I could find much better ways to connect technology to the content we as a class are learning.