Technology has always seemed to be a big part of my life. As part of the generation that grew up during the technology boom of the late 90's and early 2000's, I do not remember a time when there was not a new, exciting piece of technology available in my school. While this technology was somewhat behind the technology that was commonplace at home, it's incorporation into the classroom made me and my classmates more excited to do our schoolwork because we were doing something different.
From what I have experienced, the children in school today are not as excited about the use of technology in their classrooms because the use of computers, smartphones, and other recent technological innovations, to them, is extremely mundane. However, this is not a bad thing. As discussed in the Twitter Chat, access to technology and the internet allows and enables students to investigate the questions that interest them and find help in the areas in which they are less confident without it seeming like a big deal. In these ways, the students are able to have a bigger hand in their education than was previously welcomed in classrooms. For all of the technology that was present in my time as a student, very little of it was in the student's hands and the decisions regarding it's use were almost entirely teacher controlled. The same could be said for the content I learned. Classrooms were very much a presentation of content by the teacher, except in the cases of projects or student presentations where we got to choose a topic from a limited list of potential issues to investigate.
In the 21st century classroom, educational technology and mobile learning will aid in the production of a curriculum that is both student-led and student-focused. With the use of mobile devices and all of the resources for education that are available on those devices, students are able to find what interests them in relation to a certain content area and they are able to show this interest to a teacher, discuss it with other students, or explore the interest on their own. Before the Twitter Chat, my thinking of education technology was very focused on how the students could do their work in a different way, but the discussion of how we would use/incorporate mLearning into our classrooms really sparked my thinking about how educational technology can be used by the teacher to bring content to the students in different forms.
In particular, these two tweets by Anja made me think of the multitude of ways in which teachers could be agents of technological innovation in both their content area and their classrooms and I am excited to explore these possibilities as I start my teaching career.