Teachers are the key!

Today, I attended a session at the Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teaching (CAMT) in San Antonio, Texas. I chose to attend a session labeled "My role in preparing teachers to teach mathematics with technology." So I don't want to give much more information than that, but it did seem to obviously be about integration of technology in education.... correct? Well, I was wrong, at least for the first 30 or more minutes. It was an hour session. The presenter did have a great program/software it appeared that he was going to present but for the first 30 minutes I witnessed what we saw in the "What not to do Powerpoint" videos. I witnessed - death by powerpoint - first hand in a technology session! Powerpoint with a gazilion words and reading directly from the screen sentence after sentence. Now, I have to admit, I left early so maybe things changed after that and I am not intending to bash anyone inparticular here.

The above post is to make us ponder and learn to...
1- NOT perform death by powerpoint
2- Make a technology session if you are presenting fun and interactive or at least do not read slides one after another.

So moral of the story... we need to not do this to our kids. We need to be the ones who implement the changes we know we need. If higher ups and presenters at state conferences are promoting technology, we need to make sure we are doing so effectively because others may not be.

So, I did have many other successful sesions today.