With Twitter, I follow individuals who I feel are leaders in educational technology. They in turn are connected to many other educational technology professionals, and together we form of community of learners who share resources with each other. I must say that I know very few of these individuals, but they have provided me with a wealth of knowledge and led me to many great tools, research and other interesting reads.

Using a tool like Netvibes and Flipboard on my iPad, I have information pushed to me, information on topics that I’m interested in learning about. I also subscribe to information from various technology sites that I read on a regular basis.

My favorite is the Apple App Store where I spend hours perusing through the thousands of applications. looking for applications that will help me to do my work more efficiently. I must have downloaded hundreds of apps, both free and paid that I use for both work and school. These tools have helped me to do some work faster and better, and enabled me to do some work in new ways. Those are what I would consider more of the emerging technologies.

dean

I love Twitter and my experience has been very positive. At work, we’ve used it for professional development, for tech support and for building a sense of community. Our team is scattered throughout the campus and on our two neighbor island campuses and staying in touch with Twitter has been powerful. Much like our exploration of social presence in Second Life, Twitter also provides this sense of social presence or ambient awareness.

http://storify.com/techtiki/what-is-21st-century-learning

Powerful tool with so much potential.

dean

I believe we have only begun to scratch the surface with augmented reality and I am excited to see how this technology will mature and impact education in the years to come.

Read an article last week about Google and I began to think, “Wow,” so much of what we do on the web is guided by what Google tells us–or doesn’t tell us. How much of what we do and see is driven by what we find doing a Google search? That’s scary! In education we talk so much about digital literacy and how important it is for us to teach it to our students, but every day, I do Google searches and don’t think much about what’s being presented to me. I filter out sites that I don’t think are good or appropriate, and I often refine my searches, but I’m sure there are sites that don’t even show up because of Google’s algorithms. When you think about it, they have an a lot of say in what you see and don’t see. It concerns me that they are branching out their services more and more each day and it scares me to think how dependent we’ve become. What would life on the Internet be without Google. I think it would be quite strange these days. I wouldn’t have Gmail, wouldn’t have Google Docs, wouldn’t be able to search with Google, and who knows what else. Who knows what else? Well, I better do a search (a Google search) to see all the other things that Google does that I would be missing out on.

dean

One of things that we’ve been talking about at work is the cloud. Similar to our discussion on social media, I believe we really need to start addressing how the cloud will impact education and the work environment. What we’re finding is that many staff use tools like Evernote and Dropbox to take notes and store files online. As we are faced with eDiscovery concerns we must address how we deal with staff who use these tools. Similar to a talk I gave a few years back telling administrators and faculty that kids are no longer just consumers of information––they are now producers of information, our staff are no longer confined to the tools that we provide them. What implications does this have on our learning and our work environment?

What I’m really interested in knowing is whether or not what I speak is the same as what I write. I’m finding that as I’m speaking into the microphone that I’m doing it in chunks of words versus speaking entire sentences. I find that I’m having a much easier time speaking into the microphone when I imagine myself conversing with someone else. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it seems pretty weird talking to my computer. It seems much more natural to interact with my computer via my keyboard. In the short time that I have been using DragonDictate I find that I’m getting more and more used to using this method of inputting my thoughts and feel that with enough practice this will become natural.

One thing I’d like to experiment with is to write about a topic, once using my voice and the second time using my keyboard. I’m interested to see which method yields better results. I’m also interested in doing more research to find out which parts of the brain are used when inputting text via voice versus inputting text using a keyboard.

Standing over my post I found that I needed to make minor edits, mostly to words that were incorrectly interpreted. All in all I would say that I am confident I could get used to using speech recognition software.

Dean

Besides the topics we discussed in class, the thing I really enjoyed was being a part of this “global” classroom. It’s great to see technology break down walls and provide real-time collaboration with students beyond our physical classroom. Wait, we don’t have a physical classroom–we meet online. That would be neat, if more schools required students to take online classes with students from other countries. It should be a requirement for high school graduation. How would that impact the next generation of workers and leaders? It would definitely give them a perspective they would not have otherwise. I’m convinced. We need to provide these opportunities for our students. I want my own children to experience this.

Changing the subject, but this is what I plan to do for my next post. I’m going to use Dragon Dictate for the Mac to speak my post. How is this related to our class? Well, although Dragon isn’t a new program, speaking what you would normally write is a whole different experience. It’s a whole different skill–and it takes practice. So, in that sense it is new and emerging, at least it is for me. It’s like learning how to type all over again–only now with my mouth instead of my hands. That being said, my next post might seem different, but I’m going to leave it how I say it and compare that to my previous posts which were all typed.