by Zeke Allen

Created on: January 18, 2009   Last Updated: January 27, 2009

Teaching in the digital world provides new challenges as well as new opportunities. A teacher must decide whether they want to fight the influx of digital devices that students love to have with them such as ipods, mobile phones, smart phones, and every other kind of digital device imaginable. The crux of the problem is that, while the devices may create distractions within the classroom, constantly trying to police students and finding creative ways to prevent the use of those electronic devices can be an enormous distraction every day. The one real concern about some of these devices are the many ways they provide students to cheat or share information that a teacher may not want shared with their classmates. All of these are issues that will arise for teachers in the classroom today.

Along with some of these challenges come opportunities with the use of technology in the classroom. What is available is determined mainly by a school's budget and most of them are shrinking during this recession, but the likelihood of computers and other technology becoming a fixture in most classrooms is still very high. With new tools like Smartboards, Sketchpad, podcasts, projectors, social networking sites, and all kinds of other tools come new opportunities for creative lesson planning and different ways to assess students. Sites like turnitin.com, learningpage.com, quia.com, webassign.net or any number of other resources provide ways for teachers to assign, collect, grade, and distribute assignments.

Teachers also will be expected to be proficient in programs to take attendance, organize and calculate grades, and often to build lesson plans and unit plans. Powergrade and Powerschool are two very widespread programs, things like curricuplan.com and other sites like it can help to easily pull together state standards and plans the teacher is making but also require some time to learn their features and to be able to use them effectively.

All of these innovations are clearly only the tip of the iceberg but motivated and talented teachers will find the best tools among them and quickly adjust their use of them to find the best for their students.

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