The future?

Today I got videotaped in my classroom for a little bit. Well, I was in a video at least. One of the students in my classroom is involved in a pilot program involving an iTouch. Someone came in to videotape him using his iTouch. I'm not an Apple fanboy, but it really is a useful piece of technology. One of my coworkers showed me an app on her iPhone that simulated all of the phases of mitosis a couple of day ago. You had to pinch the membranes together to activate cytokineses and pull the chromosomes away in anaphase. It makes learning large vocabulary words a heck of a lot more interesting than it normally is.

It's amazing to me the rate at which technology is spreading for better or worse. There's a lot of really awesome application that even I can think of. Look at my student's iTouch. It allows him to communicate when he otherwise would have difficulty. If we hooked it up to the internet, it could be a study aide or even turn boring lessons into something more interactive. Who knows? Maybe we'll have classroom sets of iPads or iTouches in the future instead of laptops! I was psyched today reading about a contest designing moonbases for the year 2069. I want to be alive when that happens!

Information used to be a difficult to obtain resource. What you could learn and recall was a huge part of your education (and it still is). Nowadays, it seems like it's more useful to teach how to find knowledge or interpret what you find rather than teach knowledge itself. Why teach the kids what the population of the United States is when a simple Google search will give them an exact number? Google is on their phones and with the way technology is going, it may even be imprinted on their brains one day (there's an app for that!).

I'm not going to harp on the downsides, but they are there. An innocent Google search can lead to a gut-churning porn site or virus with a simple misclick. Misinformation abounds; tact and moderation are hard to find commodities. People have become so used to easy information that when it's not available they go with the quickest answer they come up with (see "missile launch in CA"). Bullying used to be escapable, but now it can find kids wherever the internet beckons. Every day, I have to listen to kids talk about friending strangers on Facebook as they walk down the hallways. I'm glad all of these tools are going to be available to Shane when he's older. I'm not sure how I'm going to teach him how to avoid all of the disadvantages of the technology, but it is something I've thought about more lately.  You know...seeing as I'm going to be a father sometime in the next few weeks if everything goes as planned (fingers crossed and praying).

I haven't posted anything for a few days, so I wanted to post something real quick but it all boils down to me thinking about my impending fatherhood. It's something I'm thinking about more and more with the due date coming up December 12th.  The doctors said Shane may come early so that's even more to think on. I just hope the kid waits until after next week. There's only 2.5 workdays and I'd rather not have to make up an easy workweek. Plus, I'm going to a Penn State game at FedEx field this weekend with my father-in-law, his brother, and my cousin-in-law. I'm a Cornhuskers fan myself, but it will be neat to see FedEx field in person for once. The Redskins won't even be losing in it!