Advice about technology (as if I'm qualified to give any)

With any technology that you are using in your classroom, make sure that you are getting the best out of it; don't squander what it can do, and don't try to go beyond it. If your students all have access to graphing calculators, trying using them for more complicated things than just the standard four operations, and let the students do more meaningful things than simply imitated a list of abstract commands. Work on understanding all the features that it has. Have the students write programs for it. You paid $100 for each of them, you might as well get your money's worth. If all you wanted it to do is add and subtract, you could have spent $5.50. However, if your students do not have sufficient access to graphing calculators to allow them to really get comfortable with them, don't go overboard on trying to use all their features. With the limited class time you have, potentially meaningful activities will degrade into repeat-after-me crap that won't be at all meaningful.
If your school has a computer lab you can use, Excel can allow students to explore the basic ideas of programming functions. Using the columns lets them execute the same procedure as many times as they want in just a few seconds. Excel is probably more approachable to many students, as the interface is more user-friendly, it is quicker to pick up, and often faster to use. If your computer access is limited, you will likely have more success getting students to figure out Excel quicker than a graphing calculator.
Outside of programming, sometimes teachers like to give more interesting problems to students than the standard bookwork. The issue is that many of these problems are famous, and some students will go home and google it to find the answer without thinking. To get around this, just change the problem slightly. For example, if you assign the Pancake Problem (designed by Bill Gates, I believe), students can quickly and easily locate the solution on the internet. However, change the pancakes to coins or mattresses or manhole covers or whatever, and the students won't find anything.

Quotes vaguely related to technology

“Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.” - Daniel J. Boorstin

“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.” - Max Frisch

“Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.” - Jimmy Carter

“Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.” - Ambrose Bierce

“They’re gonna be screwed once this whole internet fad is over!” - Dwight Schrute

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.” - William Gibson

“Really? You need a calculator for that?” - Several of my geometry students

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” - Elbert Hubbard

Philosophy

I believe that the best uses of technology in a math classroom are to enhance students' understanding of the topics, and to allow students to execute procedures they are comfortable with faster. I do not believe it should be used in place of comprehension, and we should be cautious about using it when students do not yet understand the material.

I will now provide some examples since I am obligated to do so. Computer programming, whether it is using Microsoft Excel or graphing calculators, is a great way to help students thoroughly understand procedures and algorithms. Say for instance that you are studying regular polygons. You could give students problems such as, "find the area of a regular octagon with sides that are 12 inches long," and they could solve it by hand and that's great. Next, they could work on how to type that program into a graphing calculator. The nice thing about computers for this purpose is that the students have to "teach" them what to do, and the computer can't guess what the student means if their explanation is incomplete. If their program comes up with the wrong answer, they have to go back and fix any errors until it is perfect; they can't fudge anything or take shortcuts. After that, you could work on generalizing the formula for any regular n-gon with sides of length x. This gives them practice manipulating variables, and taking a concrete shape like an octagon and abstracting it to something with an indeterminate number of sides. The final result in this example would be a program in which the user inputs the number of sides and their length, and the computer gives the area of that regular polygon. They could also develop programs for finding roots, generating prime numbers, or approximating logarithms. Pretty much anything you want to study, they can write a program about it.

Computers can also be used to do multiple calculations quickly and accurately. For example, using a recursive formula in Excel to generate a Fibonacci-type sequence. This takes a lot of the boring, menial work out of the way, and allows students to focus on the bigger picture and get more in-depth into the topic. However, this has many drawbacks if you try to use it in place of student understanding. Using the polygon example above, students would have an extremely difficult time writing that program if they did not have experience themselves executing that procedure (it's not easy to write even if they do). You see this often in some classrooms, where students can do something like use a graphing calculator to find the roots of a polynomial but don't understand what it really means. The computer becomes too much of a crutch, and their understanding is truly just in their short-term memory. The technology should be used to expedite procedures and algorithms students are already comfortable with, not relied upon from the outset.