Classroom Technology Inventory

The main thing I realized by doing this technology inventory was that there is plenty of technology available to use at the elementary school, but teachers rarely take advantage of it. While most of the technology is not in every classroom, it is usually shared by the grade level teams and available for each teacher to reserve and use. Asking my teacher some of the questions on the inventory list, most of her answers were something like, "Yeah, I'm sure we have that if I ever wanted to use it". This tells me that she is confident in her school for supplying good technology, but that she has little personal experience with actually using it. It also tells me that she feels comfortable in the fact that the school does have technology, but she does not have a strong desire to look into exactly what resources the school has to offer. This reinforced to me the importance of educating teachers on how and when to use technology in the classroom. There are many more resources available to teachers than what are actually used in the classroom.
I was also interested to discover that many teachers consider something as simple as an overhead projector to be using technology in schools. Last week I was observed for one of the lessons I taught the second grade class, and one of the positive comments my instructors made to me after observing my lesson was my effective use of "technology"- and that technology being the overhead projector. This makes me realize that using technology to teach does not have to be an elaborate, over-the-top lesson. Technology should make teaching easier, not harder. If more teachers believed this and educated themselves about technology to make this true, I think more teachers would be eager to take advantage of the technological resources that are available to them through their schools.