I will always remember growing up in an age when computers began to enter every aspect of life. My first job was a position as a cashier in the concession stands at the local baseball and soccer parks. Back then cashiers actually dealt with cash and only cash. I remember doing all of the math in my head becasue we didn't even have cash registers. I remember when we got cash registers for the first time and how confusing it was to figure them out. I could do the math in my head much faster than I could find the right buttons to push. Now everyone has a register (and as Dr. Yates pointed out, we no longer call them "cash" registers).
I remember my friends at school getting into computers in middle school and always talking about the newest games, etc. I had no idea what megahertz or bytes were, but I heard about them all of the time. In my house we had an Apple IIe with a nice back and green screen. This of course didn't appeal to me, so computers were never my thing.
Getting into school, I remember being taught to type in 4th grade but typewriters were still in use then. it wasn't until 8th grade that I had my first computer course and it was pretty cool. Well, class was boring. We did a lot of data entry and essay writing. Finishing early and playing The Oregon trail made the class worth it. In high school, computers were just there. othing seemed new or special. Microsoft Word was about the only thing we used. That and a little thing called the Internet. (By the way, I remember my first encounter with the Internet. My dad showed it to me at his work one day and told me that you could find anything on it. I asked him to look up the NBA and sure enough they had a website. It took forever to download the site, but it had everything. You could even watch videos on it. I asked my dad to play a video and he tried, but 20 minutes of downloading didn't even have half of the video loaded. Now I can go to Youtube and watch videos that start playing with the click of the mouse... no more double clicking either...why did we ever double-click in the first place?)
College is the first time I really used a computer for all of its capabilities. Internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and e-mail. Okay, so computers could do a lot more, but I didn't need it for any more than just that. By the end of my undergraduate work I was always on the computer, writing a paper here and creating a presentation there.
Now to the meat of the matter. Part of the reason that I never got into computer technology is it didn't seem to have much relevence to me. Then when it did, I used it sparingly because I thought it was boring (yes, PowerPoints are awesome but can kill a class). I was fortune enough to have had technology class at BYU-Idaho with a professor who understood the need to match technology to the assignment at hand. He taught us all sorts of neat tricks of the trade, but would always question our judgement of using certain tools. "Don't use technology just to use it. Use it to meet the needs of the class or the assignment. Sometimes the only technology you need is a #2 pencil and a spiral notebook." I will for ever and always appreciate how he taught us to use technology to enhance learning instead of enhancing the "cool" factor. (Having never seen a Smartboard until 3 semesters before I graduated from college, I thought it was just technology for technology's sake. Now that I know what they can do I think they are great tools. Plus, I hate chalk. Give me a whiteboard any day ... or a Smartboard if you have an extra.)
Much like activities planned for the classroom, I believe that technology must meet the needs of the class. The class should not meet the needs of technology or an assignment. Smartboards, Smartpens, PowerPoint and Internet = awesome. Sometime, however, a book and a pen are even awesomer. Yes , thats right. Awesomer. What people used to say before spell check warped our minds...
