My personal experiences of technology and learning

I honestly don't remember using much technology within my education to date, particularly in the earlier years. My primary school only had computers when I was around year 4 or 5, and in secondary school we mainly learned from textbooks or teacher talk. I never found ICT lessons enjoyable. This is rather surprising because my father is a computer whizz and works with them every day. I'm not sure if it was the way the lessons were delivered, or if I just had a genuine lack of interest. We'll go with the latter. ICT is the only subject that gave me a C grade at GCSE, ruining my clean run of A's and the occasional B's from other subjects. I just didn't enjoy the whole "do this and take a screenshot to put in a file" thing. At university, technology was widely used as a learning aid within my lectures. Unfortunately, this was indeed "death by PowerPoint". Every lecture was the same. We'd all file in, the lecturer would read off the slides, and then put the presentation on Blackboard for everyone who didn't bother attending. Not the best teaching strategy, in my opinion. Despite this, Blackboard did come in rather handy. Very similar to Moodle, Blackboard is a virtual learning environment used to share files between lecturers and students, and also to submit assignments. I also used the internet as a learning aid throughout my degree, using journal databases such as Google Scholar for essays, and I found this extremely helpful. I still feel that the world of technology for teaching is only just beginning, and it's exciting, however I still fear that technology might attempt to replace the invaluable student-teacher relationship, and I hope that it does not take over the point of what it means to be a "teacher". Teachers teach students, they do not put a video on and allow that to teach students, or make a presentation and allow that to teach students. They should just merely be aids, and not replace the true intent of the transfer of information from teachers to students.