[Phenomenology] Short Writes #2

My Lived Experience of Using Technology in Teaching Practice First Time

It was 2000. I graduated from college and entered a junior high school beginning my one-year internship and my life of a student teacher. At that time the personal computer was not prevalent, and the Internet access was very limited. The City government passed a budget that allowed every school teachers could borrow a laptop from school in order to integrate technology in the classroom. While most of the veteran teachers never used computers in their whole life, I became one of the student teacher that being pushed to learn these technology stuffs and show how they works in teaching and learning.

At the end of the student teaching year, every student teacher needed to hold a teaching demonstration event in which demonstrate how he/she will teach in front of all of the administrators and teachers in the school, also, the advisors from his/her undergrad educational program. These audiences will see how the student teacher performs and give him/her the final grade.

I made a brave decision. I decided to use PowerPoint Slides during my teaching demonstration. It seems not a big deal today but really was very challenging to me at that time. Organizing PowerPoint was not a problem for me at all. I enjoyed weaving my thoughts into a sequence of slides and incorporate more images and multimedia in my slideshow. I kept imaging how I actually teach this lesson through these slides, how I interact with students, and how I make my teaching activities more fun because the affordance provided by the features of the PowerPoint programs. When I finished my final draft, with the file playing slide by slide on the laptop. I was as happy as clam and couldn't stop smiling. It was like smiling from the very inner part of my body, and constantly kept my cheek muscles rising.

The challenge part came from the overall connection from one hardware to another, and how they worked smoothly when I actually used them. For example, I needed to setup my props in a very short time. I needed to connect my laptop to the projector properly. I needed to make sure the projector actually projected the image from my computer to the screen, not showing a blue screen instead. I needed to make sure my speakers worked when I was playing the slides. I needed to make sure the microphone worked perfectly when I spoke. To prevent something unexpected happened, I rehearsed all of these preps several times before the day I taught.

That day had finally come. I put on a formal suit that I never wore when I taught. I had a little makeup on my face. It was humid and hot. My sweat was all over my body, making my make-up floating on my face. My hands were trembling when I was plugging all of my equipment together. When my mentor brought all of my students and other guests to the classroom, I couldn't recognized all of the faces even though in fact I knew all of them. These were just faces. I took a few deep breathes, heard my heart pounding heavily, and began to do my first click to the pointer. Suddenly all of the tensions among my muscles released when I saw the equipments work perfectly. I felt my foot were floating on the air. My students were particularly behaved while  this event was happening. Every prompt question I asked soon got an adequate answer by one my students. The time passed so fast during the 50-minute teaching demonstration. When I finished my final words, I received a burst of applause and heard some people gave me courtesy comments.

When it was all done. I sat in my office alone. The past 50 mins just like a play and I was the only actress on the stage. I couldn't remember any word I spoke during the demonstration. "Is that a real teaching?" I asked myself and couldn't come out of a answer after the exhausting day.