Technology in Education

I honestly can't say that I had great access to technology in my schooling.  I learned how to type in Elementary School and then again in middle school, but I never took a computer class in high school.  Although I feel like I used the computers a lot, but it was mostly just for writing papers and the occasional powerpoint presentation.  And even at that, we never had a full lesson on how to make  the best powerpoint.  The one thing that I still use, technology-wise, from high school are the onlice databases that help to create works cited pages for papers.  I still find that very helpful.  Now that I am in college, a lot more teachers are using discussion boards or blogs online, which is something I am not used to, but I think it is a really effective way to share ideas within a large classroom.  I am looking forward to using that kind of technology.  As an elementary school teacher I know I am going to have to keep up with the ever-changing technology.  Kids have shorter and shorter attention spans now than they did even just five years ago.  So, in order to keep the attention of the kids in my classroom, I will have to know how to efffectively use things like a doc-cam or elmo for large class learning.  I am also going to be learning how to use prezi in one of my classes, so I think that could be a really effective cool.  I also think that I will need to have a really good knowledge of things like an iPad or tablet so that if any of my students feel the need to use one, I can control the use of it the best I can.  Hopefully, in an elementary school classroom I won't have to deal with a bunch of the kids having cell phones or ipad's but times are changing and I have a feeling that by the  time I am running my own classroom I will have a lot more of those things to contend with.