Ain't no Justice; Just us,

"Very crudely, I think, we are discussing how the good and bad things in life should be distributed among the members of a human society." That is how David Miller defines Social Justice in his book Principles of Social Justice (Social Justice, Swain & Edyburn) If I don't use technology in my classroom am I doing a Social Injustice to my students? I would argue that there is some validity to this idea that it is a moral issue to include technology. In order to best prepare students for a career we probably should incorporate an amount of technology. I do believe that it will be most effective if I can find a way to blend the technology I teach with something they do already do for fun, or something they might want to do for fun. If they can create podcasts for their friends then it makes learning that skill a lot more enjoyable. The issue becomes cloudier when we consider social justice, it is a great ideal, but in the end it is an ideal, if social justice were prevalent, or even common we wouldn't be having this discussion, but alas it isn't. So I am caught between a desire to teach children about technology and to teach children how to think. Technology is like a knee brace, or a crutch incredibly helpful if you need it, but it can become harmful if you come to rely exclusively on it. I see my role as an educator to learn what access my student have to technology, keep current on the skills that they will need in the workplace, and incorporate those skills with my subject matter in as entertaining a way as I can. I need to teach them that technology is a tool, not an end all be all. As I see if I want social justice for my students then I have is to ensure that they know how to think, not just to have thoughts, but to truly assess, analyze, and implement solutions. If I have a child with limited access to the internet at home, I can tell them where they can get access, or I could challenge them to find it on their own, and guide them if they need it. The lesson for me isn't in the technology it is in the creativity and the adaptability. We live in a world that has no social justice, and will not have it for the foreseeable future, so instead of pretending it exists, I want to teach children how to overcome whatever social injustice they face, and technology is a tool, but not the only one. The Greeks said "everything in proportion and nothing to extreme" this is a sentiment that is no less true now than it was then.

PowerPoint or PowerPointless

The best items that I saw during the PowerPoint presentations were the continues use of excellent pictures and video that applied to the content, I also liked the use of music, all of this would have been wasted on cluttered slides, but most of the presentations had very clean easy to read slides. I enjoyed the slides that just had a few words and then the presenter elaborated on the rest of the information.
There were a few presentations that were fairly difficult to sit through, despite everything that every article in the required reading said they still had a metric butt-load of words on each slide, many without pictures, and even a few with clip art. These slides were painful, but not nearly as much as when the presenter read the same slides to me.
After seeing all of the other presentations I would make a concerted effort to limit the words on each of my slides to the very minimum. I would try to find pictures that were captivating and helped illustrate what I was talking about, not become what I was talking about.
I really like using PowerPoint as a presenter it provides visual and audio props all on one platform, it makes it easy for me to outline my talk for a natural flow. PowerPoint also allows me to create notes for students on a separate piece of paper. The drawback of using technology in the classroom is firmly centered around one Mr. Murphy and his first law "if it can go wrong, it will go wrong". If we get into a position where we rely solely on technology for our lesson then we risk the loss of a lesson with the failure of that technology.