“I’ve found that technology is replacing what’s already easy to teach [in math]. So what’s the point?”
— My first practicum associate teacher
Prior to this conversation with my first practicum associate teacher, I didn’t know why I loved watching him teach. Outside of a PowerPoint for visual scaffolding and desmos activities for extension tasks, his classes were so engaging even with limited technology. When we talked about the technology recommendations I was getting from teacher’s college, he laughed. If implementing technology was only substituting traditional strategies for what was already easy to teach and with similar efficacy, what’s the point in the effort?
Instead of focussing on choosing technology for the sake of its inclusion, he worked on building relationships and leveraging behaviourist and cognitivist learning theories. Technology was used to support these theories if the learning benefits outweighed the set up and maintenance costs.