Photo's of New Technology

Flexible, full-color OLED display

(photo: www.pinktentacle.com)

Tools for the Visually Impaired

This one is actually from a blog. Beryl Plimmer focuses her research on Human-Computer Interaction. There are a lot of different things on her blog, I would recommend looking at it. I find that this would be helpful if a teacher would have a student who needed some extra help.

(photo: www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~beryl/)

Sixth Sense

(photo: www.blog.subscribermail.com)

Ultrasound Technology

(photo: www.medgadget.com)

This is a Photo Blog. I thought that these were pretty neat new technology. I did like how in Erin's blog she talked about wiki's and blogs. Kind of touching on when people should use a blog or a wiki.

Podcast

Technology Talks podcast. It is a podcast on kind of how to make a podcast.

Learning/Teaching Opportunities through Virtual Worlds

(photo from: www.weblogsinc.com)

This last week we spent the class in SecondLife. It was an interesting experience. I was told that I was good at it, even though it was like my 3rd time on it. I do think that it is an interesting thing to have to communicate with other people from all over the world. I don't know if I know really all of the point for it as an educational use. Sure it's cool that you can fly and you can change your avatar to look like whatever you like, but still...

Looking at it from a mathematical standpoint, I don't know if I would use something like SecondLife in the classroom. I did like the fact that you could make the different shapes and such, but so can other programs like Google-Sketchup. I think my problem with something like SecondLife is that there are other things that are not educational on there. I guess what sticks out in my mind is the fact that essentially anything could happen there, and not good things. If I were to teach my students about shapes, then I would use the Sketchup because you don't have the problems of the avatars and what could happen in not safe areas.

I do think that SecondLife could be used to possibly build a house for an educational aspect, but I don't know. I would think that you could do the same thing in Sketchup to an extent and it would be a little safer.

(Detractor Blogging, Life Blogging)

The new Twitter...Birddi

(picture from Facternet.com)

The other day I was watching the Ellen DeGeneres Show. On October 14 she was talking about Birddi, which if you have heard about this it is like Twitter, but it is all in Spanish. Which I didn't know what to think about it at first, but after a while I feel like it is a good idea. Ass you can see the layout is basically the same as Twitter, just in Spanish. Which I think that it is a good idea to have something like this for people who don't speak English. So right now, I am looking to see if there are any other types of Twitters out there for a multitude of languages.

So apparently there are a lot of Twitter spin offs. I found another blog that was talking about Birddi being a spin off, which I also found that there were some other ones too. The blog was called Facternet.

If people like Twitter so much, I would have imagined that they would have it for people all over the world and not just in English.

I am going to say that this is an Announcement or Link blogging, since I hadn't heard about it until the other day.

Virtual Worlds

I think that the most that I have heard about virtual worlds is from Second Life. I don't have a Second Life account yet. What I do know about it is that it's a way for people from around the world to connect with each other. People can decide what they want to do, ranging from shopping, working, and just talking with other people. I see it as a way to communicate with a 3D version of how you want to make yourself. It looks interesting, I don't know if I would use Second Life in my classroom. I would have to think about that a bit more.

I also found a Virtual Worlds Review. Which this looked good because it listed just about every kind of virtual world that there is out there. Some of them look like they are free, but not all of them.

Another things that would be a virtual world would be The Sims. But I don't think that you can communicate with other people, you just create your own world. There is an online version of The Sims.



Something else that is exciting is that I have been using a Promethean Smartboard at my Level 3 Field Experience. It would be nice to learn more about that technology, but it is pretty cool and not too bad to use. :)