What would you do without your technology?  The other day my bulb for my projector blew out.  It was at the end of the day so no classes were affected, but I was faced with the question: What am I going to do tomorrow?  I have no other board in my classroom other than my smart board.  So I put on my thinking cap and got to work.  I grabbed a portable whiteboard from the library and began preparing my materials for my classes.  Unfortunately I was planning to do work with ellipses and the Hall of Statuary in my precalc classes (Washington DC … YouTube it) .  We had already seen the video and were getting involved in the calculations.  I found myself going to find some string and tape to make a tool to draw and ellipse on the board (something that would have taken 10 seconds to do with the smart board).  I had a Notebook document with all the notes for the class prepared including diagrams and pictures.  It was too much to redraw on my tiny whiteboard so I printed out handouts.  I had to do similar things for my geometry class and algebra 2 class.  It took two hours of prep work to match what I had prepared digitally in at least 25% of the time.  I found myself thinking that there is no way I could do this everyday.  When I think about technology in the classroom it has become so embedded in the way I teach that replacing it with other methods would be too time consuming to be possible.

For our students that are moving into 2033 the perspective of the world has changed.  Technology is no longer an add on.  It is not a nice thing to add to a lesson.  It has become so integral to the lesson that without it the lesson become next to impossible to reproduce.  I believe I am covering content more deeply and and authentically than I ever could 10 or 15 years ago.   Technology has allowed my to connect the real world into my classroom to make the math do what it was designed to do:

“The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics … the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word” Galileo Galilei

Math is used to explain our universe … we don’t use the universe to explain math…

Think about how teaching with technology has changed the way you teach and what would you do if you lost it for a day …a week, a month.