Is technology good for us?

Disclaimer: I am a technology junky at work and home.

Since I am taking an online course about technology, I have been reading a lot of posts about how important it is and how teachers need to embrace it.

I wonder how much technology has helped us as teachers. Email communication is convenient, but has it gone too far? On any given day I get 25-50 emails a day. My principal said she gets around 100 a day, and in speaking with my superintendent he said he has been training his secretary to go through them, and after that he only answers those in the morning, because nothing would get done.

In my district we are playing catch up on getting technologies into classrooms. In a math department of nine, two of us got smart boards installed just last year. Two more got installed this year, and there are still five teachers with out. It is great we are getting these, but our tech department cannot keep up. Last year my projector went out and it took six weeks to get replaced. This year, it took over a month to get a program installed on my computer (we are blocked from installing our own programs).

At times technology has created as many headaches as positives. I am excited to see what the future brings, but at the same time I am nervous of the complications that will come with it.