Technology can be a very important, useful tool in the classroom to empower learning, but needs to be used correctly, appropriately and with a purpose, not just for the reason to use technology in the room. It should involve a learning experience for the students, and at the same time, engage and enhance learning. Kids love to see and use new technology in the classroom, and many times it motivates them to learn, doing things a different way.

http://www.teachthought.com/technology/63-things-every-student-should-know-in-a-digital-world/

But sometimes technology doesn’t work as we wish when teaching. This week we saw few examples of technology not working well when we wanted to use it here at the Paleo lab. We were 3D scanning, and this is not easy to do, because we had to scan a tri-dimensional object. We were trying to get the little details of the tooth serrations of this Megalodon

tooth we were scanning, and we couldn’t. To obtain a precise 3D printed object we would have to start again because the scanning wasn’t done well enough. So technology isn’t always easy to use and it can be time consuming.

It could cost a lot too,  but that is another story.

At the end of the school year my school was able to purchase a Dino-lite Microscope Camera. Very cool tool to view very small objects, like shark teeth. It can take pictures of shark teeth and take measurements of them, very small measurements with great precision. With Bucky,  our mentor,we are learning how to use it in the lab, but again, it is not that easy to use. It is supposed to take stacked pictures and then produce a neat picture of a tooth at all the different levels of the 3D  object, in this case the tooth, but it didn’t show the picture after taking the stacked pictures. So, it takes time, and patience to figure out how technology works, and how to use it correctly.