TPACK Lessons

This week in Educ 250 we learned about incorporating TPACK into our lesson planning. It was very interesting as I began to think about the need for technology in my future classroom--if I am a teacher until I retire, some of my last students will be born in 2050, graduating in 2068! The world in which they live will be vastly different from my own, and I need to prepare them as best as I can for their adult lives. I agree that incorporating technology into my lessons is an excellent way to keep students engaged and help them see the relevance of subjects. If they view subjects like math as something that can only be done on pen and paper, while everything else in their life is done digitally, they may not respect it or see its relevance. The TPACK lesson definitely gave me a bit of anxiety as I thought about what life might look like in twenty years. I am honestly a bit skeptical about how much more technological progress the human race is capable of making due to the current stress it is putting on our planet--I have no doubt that the ideas and knowledge is there, but I wonder if the planet will be able to sustain the kind of lifestyle that we are heading towards, and if it cannot, I want to make sure that my students are able to do things both ways. Maybe that is just my grandfather speaking through me, but it is something that I have been thinking about a lot since Monday's discussion.
My K-12 experience with technology was very negative. None of my schools were ever able to afford classroom sets of any piece of technology, so the few times that any of my teachers tried to incorporate it, it usually went very poorly and ended up taking away from the lesson. I do not want to incorporate technology just for the sake of doing so--it needs to have an actual purpose in my classroom. This is a significant bias that I must begin to tackle if I am going to be a diverse teacher in the 21st century.