Week 3 - Thing 7

Anything technology related. That's a pretty wide topic!

Two things are of interest to me in the last couple of months.

1. I got a cheap 1g MP3 player, mostly to better understand how they work. I'm not big on walking around with headphones on listening to music all the time. (I guess I'm a bit old school in that it seems rude to be around others with headphones on or while talking on a cell phone.) Although I have used it to download music to, the biggest use I've found for it is checking out audiobooks from NetLibrary (through my local library), downloading them to the player, then using the player in my car to listen to books. Since I don't often listen to it other than in the car, I'm not sure this is a huge improvement over just checking out the CD's from the library but it does have some advantages... smaller device, don't have to make a trip to the library, don't have to change CD's while driving. Also, I was able to take the player recently on a long plane flight where I could finish listening to the book I was "reading". I've had the opportunity to talk to my students several times, giving them a little better understanding about the things that are available to them.

2. Sightspeed. I've been intrigued by the idea of videophones for years, hoping that someday they would actually materialize. Recently, I got a webcam at a huge discount from buy.com and decided to give the current videoconferencing tools a try. Turns out Sightspeed is pretty darn good! With it, you can record a video from your pc to send someone or you can call them up and talk "face to face", assuming they have Sightspeed and a webcam and they're logged on to the pc at the time. The technology still has a little ways to go but for using videoconferencing with family and friends who are distant is great. And even more impressive... it's free!

These are fun times we live in!! If only we can figure out how to keep up!

Week 3 - Thing 6

Fun stuff. I started out looking at some of the mashups and found myself a couple of hours later still exploring. I like the movie poster, trading cards and magazine covers. All of them certainly have curriculum connections that can extend to just about any subject. My only concern would be that students might become more engaged with the technology than the actual content (much as I did while exploring the site). Because of this, I think it would be important to provide a fair amount of structure, especially to younger students when using this for projects.

I also explored the trip planner mashup with high hopes. Unfortunately, the site doesn't yet have enough users to make it too valuable. My hope was that there would be detailed trip routes and journals for trips. However, I mostly found skeleton trips that appeared to have been created by people like me who were just trying it out. I also couldn't find a way to delete what I had created which seems like a drawback. However, since these are user developed solutions, it makes sense that they might not have all the bells and whistles that professional applications might have.

I got a notice in the mail recently that Frommer's travel website is creating a Flickr group so maybe that will develop into a robust travel site.

A fun exercise.