My Opinion on Technology in the classroom

There have not been many classes where I can remember technology ever helping me learn. As an elementary school student, I attended a Catholic school that offered one computer lab of 30 computers to the entire school population. We even had a once weekly class in the lab. Subject matter changing as you got older. Younger kids would play games, 3-5th grade learned proper typing technique, and the middle school used it for word processing. As far as I can remember we were told to use a specific program and then pretty much left to sink or swim for the next 45 minutes.

Is this an effective method? Not unless you wanted to separate the technologically savvy kids from their peers in the early 90's.  When we learned to type we used the program "Mavis  Beacon teaches Typing". The class started with a diagnostic provided by the program and then we progressed to typing lessons. Some of my classmates progressed very rapidly, completing the program after 4 class sessions, then they got to play games while the rest of us still struggled with proper hand placement. This distracted us from our work because we just wanted to play a game too.

This situation was totally aggravating. While the reward for completing our work was great. Students who struggled with the typing program only got distracted when their neighbor started playing a game. The teacher let the program do all the work and sat behind his desk reading a paper. This class really divided the students who got to use a computer at home from those of us who had minimal exposure to it. I feel like I taught myself to type, and manipulate the programs placed in front of me.