Type I and Type II Technology

While reading the Type II Applications of Technology in Education: New and Better Ways of Teaching and Learning by Cleborne D. Maddux and D. LaMont Johnson I was able to understand their terms greatly. In my own words I would consider Type I to be the misuse of technology in the classroom, mainly because the teacher is unsure or unwilling to learn how to use the technology. Because of this students are at the disadvantage. Examples of this would be not having an available computer in the classroom, not teaching computer skills as a class in elementary school because the sooner you become comfortable with technology the easier it will be in the future and the last example of Type I would be not upgrading the technology in schools. I understand that it is a major expense but it will eventually pay off, students will be able to use faster internet for better research, better programs for their projects and new techniques that could be used in the future work field. It will engage much more of the student population. Type II is a lot more familiar to me and my generation. I consider Type II to be using new programs and new technology on a daily bases, teachers teaching students new thing and students teaching teachers! Type II is having the world wide web at out fingertips, much like it is now. I was never in a school that did not have multiple computers in each room for all students use. We had a MAC lab in elementary - high school and our high school refurbished old air box computers, gutted it out and put new hard drives and MAC programs on all of them. We had a computer for over half the population of the school! That is a ton of computers! We were on the cutting edge of technology, being a school about ten years old. We had a great facility and teachers that kept up with technology. My example classes were Video Production where we made movies ALL the time, and I was anchor for the school news that we filmed and edited daily to show over the TVs in each classroom. I also took a desktop publishing class, that may sound boring but we did projects on almost every program that was offered on the computers. Other teachers and people in the community would have us putting their news out and we were getting graded on it! The last class that is a great example of Type II was Web Design. So many people took this class and were making their own webpages for school news, sports updates and homework that teachers wanted put on the web. This class alone sent 14 kids to NESCOM (New England School of Communications) in Bangor in just my senior year! I think that integrating technology has to be done for every student and we see this in our classes this year with blogging our homework! There should not be a future school that does not offer the highest technology that they can afford!!