Technologies available to teachers in the 21st century

Educators in the 21st century have better access to endless possibilities for the classroom due to the quickly advancing technologies. Teacher’s now have programs that make grading quicker and easier, their able to teach in classrooms that are miles away, and overseas communications with other schools via the internet.
Programs like Grade Quick make the traditional paper and pencil grade book a thing of the past. Before Grade Quick, at the end of the quarter, trimester, or semester, the teacher had to calculate his or her students’ entire grade averages with a calculator. This was an extremely time consuming process, especially if the teacher had a large number of students. It also left a lot of room for careless errors in calculations. By using Grade Quick, student’s averages for the quarter, trimester, or semester are given automatically, saving the teacher hours of grueling manual calculations.
In my high school, we had a room called the “ATM room”. In this case, ATM stands for asynchronous transfer mode, which is a “broad band fiber-optic networking system that transmits voice, video, and data” (Knox). The ATM room has a couple cameras set up on the walls, three T.V. screens in the back of the classroom, and one bigger T.V. screen in the front of the room. Basically how it works is the cameras record the teacher at one school teaching his or her class (we had a Japanese class and an American Sign Language class) and the footage sent to other schools in Maine. The students from the other schools can see and hear the teacher live and were also able to ask questions. I believe handouts were given via fax machine, but I’m not sure how the teacher went about grading assignments from the students at the other schools. This technology has been around for a while now but I still find it very fascinating and amazing that you can take classes from teachers who could be hours away from you or in another state, maybe even across the country.
The article DiaLogos: A Sister Class Exchange between Greece and Canada is about a class project done between elementary school students in Toronto, Canada and elementary school students on the islands of Rhodes and Kassos in Greece. The students in Greece had a three hour per week class where they learned the English language and many of the students in Canada were “of Greek heritage and were learning Greek in supplementary classes outside the regular school day” (Cummins, Brown, & Sayers). I think it’s amazing that students from different countries can interact enough to work on a school project. I especially like the fact that there is a language barrier yet both classes are collaborating and making it possible to understand each other.
Technologies available to teachers today makes things that weren’t possible ten or fifteen years ago possible. You can now take or teach a class that is miles away, you can do class projects, and the once grueling process of averaging grades can be done in seconds.


Cummins, J., Brown, K., & Sayers, D. (2007) Literacy, Technology, and Diversity: Teaching for
Success in Changing Times. Boston: Pearson.

Knox, Karen. "Advanced Telecommunications for Maine." 4 Sep 2008
.