3 Effective Technologies for the Classroom

Mission and Objective: This blog is dedicated to provide opportunities, suggestions, and ideas to help teachers, administrators, and anyone else that believes that effective technology use is key to reaching the new generation of students.

As a teacher myself (Middle School Math), I use technology to free me in the classroom. I use my iPad to teach from the back of the room or anywhere I would like to go. The app that I primarily use to annotate on my iPad to my projector is called SplashTop Whiteboard.

Solving a problem on the iPad, shows up on the board

SplashTop Whiteboard



Splashtop allows the user to sync their iPad to their computer (or any computer that is logged in through  g-mail.) Every once in a while I leave the file I need on my home computer and in an instant I can log into my computer from school to home and drag the file into dropbox. All of a sudden I can now reach my file from my school computer.

Turning Point Clickers

Along with using the iPad to go over notes, I use clickers to assess students with a pre and post test for each chapter. I also create a few questions that go with each set of notes and I can do an instant quick check to see if students are learning.


Clickers provides a lot of feedback in a moments time, which is amazing, depending on what program, it will also spit out a lot of useful data to help you track your students growth. Anyone not using this technology should really consider giving these a try. The initial setup can be a little stressful, but the rewards afterwards pay off that stress extremely fast.




The last effective strategy I will be sharing today is the use of apps. There are some amazing apps out there for math, but I find it hard to find
engaging math apps that go over the topics discussed in middle school math, including Pythagorean theorem, graphing, algebra, and geometry. I have dedicated the last half of a year creating my very own math app called WileD Math.

WileD Math

This app is designed for students to try those challenging problems and afterwards, the students can spend credits to play the fun little mini-games where the objective is to earn the highest score possible.

I consider this app an effective use of technology because I can have half of my students working on problems we learned in class and the other half can spend some time one on one with myself, where I can really focus on their math skills or spend time developing a new, more complex skill. The app provides breakdown on student results, which means I can take it out of a grade if I wanted to. Every question on the app is self generating, which means their is an unlimited amount of questions that can occur. Problems are written in multiple ways and the app is currently expanding and meeting needs in all areas.




In short, technology is the way of the generation of students we are having. It is time for teachers to begin adopting effective technology in the room to promote critical thinking and higher levels of engagement. Technology by itself is not beneficial in the classroom, rather technology used in conjunction with sound lessons where the technology provides perks including instant feedback, higher levels of engagement, interactions, or a combination of everything.