New Technology Opportunities Lost

In my school that I am currently placed in, there are not many opportunities for the students to use technology.  Even though the school tries to have computers in most of the classrooms, there is never enough for students to all use and when they get a chance to have an assignment on the computer they never get much time by themselves to learn and explore.  In my classroom there are only 4 computers that the students are able to use and sometimes not all of them work, so when the students are in groups working on the computers they must share.  Even though it is great that the students even have access to computers I wish the school would try to explore different ways that they can use the technology to their advantage.  When students are on the computer they are mostly going onto a few selected websites that have quick games that help them in language arts and math.  Although this is great the kids get to have fun with their learning, there is just so much more than can be done on the computer besides games as we have talked about in class. 

My teacher does try to use the technology available to her when she can, for example when writing stories we would have meetings with individual students at the computers so that they can edit their writing with a teacher on the computer.  This I thought was great because the students didn’t have to go through what I had to as a kid of re-writing and re-writing the paper over and over again until the teacher approved.  Now the students can make simple changes to their work without going through the painstaking process of handwriting all of your work when there were only a few grammatical errors.  Though I think this is a great way for the students to use the technology in the classroom, I do not feel that they are not exploring more possible uses for the computers in the classroom.  I sat in on a meeting with a couple of teachers and the topic of technology did come up in the meeting.  Most of the teachers were talking about how they are still unfamiliar with most of the functions that the computers can do and that they are still having issues with understanding their email.  With that knowledge of the teachers not being able to be well trained in the new developments in technology, I wonder if the technology is developing faster than the schools can keep up and multiple opportunities are being lost.