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From an Instructional Technology Specialist

This blog is focused on the use of technology and education. The thoughts here may sometimes be Pie In The Sky, but I hope they are helpful.

Friday, April 29, 2005

Interesting Thoughts and Stories

I am a big fan of WIRED Magazine, which is a pop culture technology magazine. Two articles in the April 2005 issue that I found were interesting focused on education and technology. One article talked of MIT, AMD, Google, and News Corp. working together to create a $100 Laptop that could be sold to schools. The thought of every student in every school in the United States having their own computer isn't as far off as we think.

Another inspiring article was about a group of students from Arizona who competed in a competition to build an underwater robot. Here is a group of High School students who competed in the highest level of the competition with an $800 budget, and beat MIT with their $11,000 budget! Not only was money limited, but reading about the creativity that students used as they ran into problems was very exciting. This is one great example of how students can engage in the higher level thinking skills. In this instance technology may have been central to their learning, but there are other ways of making technology simply the means.

First Post

This is the first post in this blog. I thought that it would be a good time to tell you a little about the goal of this. I really want to be able to use this blog as a place for learning for me and other people that I teach. The idea of opening Blogging to students and classrooms is something that is integrating to me. The ability to have students think about their learning using something like this opens up a world of possibilities. Technology and the ways that it can be used are vast and forever changing. The use of technology in the classroom is something that must evolve as technology evolves. However we can't loose the focus of what it is we are teaching or why it is we are teaching. Educating students to be life long learners in what it is they are interested in should always stay the focus, technology is just another tool to help students learn.