What's your experience with using technology effectively in learning (formal or informal)?

According to the Nellie Mae Education Foundation 43% of students feel unprepared to use technology towards higher education and even into their classroom experience's or into their classroom as well. I am part of that statistic, I feel extremely unprepared to use technology as I go along into my career whether that's into my academic career or even into my teaching or student teaching career. I'm not prepared for what is to come in the future of technology.

For me I've never really had a successful time using technology for successful learning. I'm not a very tech savy person, and typically don't understand half the time what is going on in the "techy world," I'm more of a hands on individual and preferred to do things the old fashioned way, and not having more than one or two options for ways to do something.

I have friends and know others who have had a successful time using technology for learning in both formally and informally. I know that I will eventually have to become more okay and tech savy in a classroom.

I've seen in other classrooms that I haven't personally been in that have had technology help the students that technology helps meet their strengths and helps them learn better. Technology helps enable students to meet a mastery level rather than always struggling with not being able to understand certain things. It also helps with student thinking, whether that may be critically thinking or analytically thinking, it helps a student grow. These have all been things that I've had friends experience rather than me experiencing anything like this.

Growing up, we never had many things in our classroom that were related to technology since I went to a primarily poor school. The only form of "technology," I guess you could call it was an overhead projector. I wouldn't necessarily call that technology even though it takes energy to work/use. But all of the teachers that I've had that used an overhead projector, have never been able to use them "properly" without standing in front of the screen and blocking everything that's on the board, smudging everything they wrote across the projector, or just not being "smart" enough to use it. So overall I haven't had many experiences with using technology in the classroom. Even in college all of my classrooms have still had white boards or chalk boards, and not much technology based courses.

After writing this blog I have grown fond of being able to in a sense spit up everything I'm feeling in one quick spurt and posting it and seeing what others say. I don't think anyone will read this post other than my professor. But from what I can tell over-blog is easy to use and user friendly, really anyone could ever use it and they would be great at what they are doing/saying.

So in conclusion, I like over-blog, and I've never had much experience with technology, unless you classify an overhead projector as technology, but even then I've never really had an experience where technology was used effectively in the classroom, formally and informally.