How much technology is too much technology?

How much technology is too much technology?

It seems that technology in the classroom is nearly unavoidable.  Even if you commit to only using the chalkboard in the classroom, there is no escaping the student emails which always seem to come at eleven o'clock at night with questions regarding the assignment due the next day.  Our students have grown up with technology and they not only expect us to use technology, but they will require it in order to be productive students.  I like technology in the classroom, but I feel that it has its time and place. 

Technology makes my life a lot easier as an instructor.  Instead of spending valuable class time write notes on the board in chalk, I can prepare them ahead of time in Powerpoint slides.  This helps move the class along at a nice pace and keeps me on track so I know where I am in my lecture.  I also take advantage of Blackboard when I can and I have my students submit their papers to me online.  This way, if the papers where due Thursday, I can have corrections submitted back to them that night, and they can revise or use that information to study for a chapter test on Tuesday.  However, if I collect paper copies from the students, then I cannot give their revisions back to them until the next class meeting, which pushes everything back.  The online submission feature also helps keep me very organized. All of their assignments are in one folder and a student cannot skip class in order to gain an extra day on the assignment.  

Still, I feel that I use technology minimally and rely on class participation, discussion and activities or passages from the textbook to make up the bulk of my lessons.  I do fear that eventually technology will replace those things.  Instead of a textbook students will have ebooks.  Class participation will become computer interaction and discussions will move to web forums.  Eventually even the teacher might be replaced.  Particularly in foreign language, many have suggested that computer based learning could replace the foreign language classroom.  I can only hope this never happens because I believe part of education is the human element. Even if the instructor is teaching an online course, there is still another human setting goals, outcomes, giving evaluation and providing an incentive to learn and to do ones best.  It seems that having a human element gives us motivation to do better and is still one of the most important aspects in education.  If not, universities would go out of business because all of the information one can obtain in an undergraduate degree program can be found online for free. 

For now, it is best to find the proper balance in our classrooms.  Just like Lang suggests, technology can be extremely time consuming in the beginning, but it can also save us a lot of time in the long run.  We must still be aware of what our students have access to and that we do not let technology overshadow our own personalities and enthusiasm in the classroom.