Emergent Technology 3 - Kindle (Digital Books)

I choose to do my final emergent technology project on Amazon.com's device Kindle. 

Kindle very simply put is a digital book.  But instead of just being 1 book, you can have many books on the same device.  From the product description; "Holds up to 1,500 books."  Not to mention download directly from the "book store" which contains "Over 500,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including 105 of 112 New York Times® Best Sellers, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs."  This is a technology I feel very strongly schools should be looking into.  What I imagine this device being used for is to replace text books.  As more and more schools adopt no backpack rule following the events in Columbine, there is typical a struggle at least once a day for the students to get to their lockers and back to class in the allocated time.  By replacing the tradition system where each class has it's own book, switching to the Kindle would solve the need for students to carry around a lot of books there by eliminating the need for a backpack.  Think about it, all the students would have just one digital book, and they just download the text book for your subject and they're good to go.  This would be a great tool for English or Literature classes, as you assign books to students to read, they can download the book right to their device.  This could also be a Green initiative, you don't need to print all those text books, and as we all know text books, especially history or social studies where information changes so quickly.  For example I remember my 3rd grade social studies book went out of date while I was still in school because the Berlin Wall came down.  With digital books they can be updated faster without the need for printing all that paper just to have to throw it away the next year.  Another potential benefit is cost; the Kindle retails for $259 + tax and shipping.  Where as the average High School text book costs can range from $500-$600 per year.


There are several things I can think of that would create a challenge in implantation.  First you have to consider the students who would be using it.  Because it would be more fragile it would probably be a bad idea to allow younger students to be responsible for it, especially if you want them to take it home to do homework.  Another and probably the biggest issue to resolve is making sure that there are textbooks available for the device.  Now I'm not going to limit the ideal of a "digital book" to just the kindle because this would be an issue with any similar device, are the resources available?  As a teacher you would need to make sure the books are there, and how much they would cost.  Would textbook manufacturers be willing to lower the cost of the book if it's a digital version?  Would the printers even allow their books to be sold digitally because they wouldn't make as much money?  It's the sad truth that would greatly limit the use of this type of device.



Now that I've pointed out the downside, I offer one other way to implement the device.  Going back to the English or Literature classes, if you could get your school board to approve the budget for it, you could buy classroom sized amounts of a digital book, and have all the reading assignments be read on those instead of having to purchase enough copies of a book for you're entire class.  You may just find a way to lower your schools budget and that always makes Administration happy.

OMG New Futurama!!!!

Thank you whatever mighty deity has granted us with new episodes of Furturama on Comedy Central starting June 2010!!!!!  I know that I lot of exclamation marks, but I really am that happy about it.

Futurama	Weeknights, 9p/8c
New Episodes on Comedy Central
www.comedycentral.com
Futurama New Episodes Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy

Update For picasa

So I know I've already turned the assignment in and thanks to the wonderful world of the internet the latest update (3/11/2010) for picasa will now allow for collaborations.  Which means the key feature that I was looking for applying to a classroom setting is now available freely through Picasa.  And another feature just added is what's called "geotaging" where you can put in the location you took the picture and then see where you have pictures from.  Which gave me another idea have students upload pictures of places they've been and keep a tally over the year and see where people have been and make lesson plans out of some of the historic places that they've inevitably been to.  Thank you Google.

Emergent Technology 2 - photo share

Yup, that's right it's homework time again. I currently use Picasa and pay for storage space, Picasa is free unlike most of the other photo sharing sites that only offer trials and comes with 1GB of online storage space free as well.  There are two parts to Picasa, there is the web storage, I invite you to look at my gallery http://picasaweb.google.com/weeezel and there is a free program that you can download that lets you edit the photographs or images.  I also found that with Blogger, you can add a photo slideshow to your blog, very easily, you can choose from a variety of picture hosts, and then pick the gallery you want to show off.  The modular nature of Blogger, allows you to put the slides at the top, bottom, or where ever.  I'm pretty proud of some of my photographs so I put my slide show at the top so anyone viewing my blog can see.  In addition to editing Picasa also has a face recognition system, in other words if you want to find the funny picture of your friend, instead of looking through the galleries you can browse by facial recognition.  The two thoughts I have on that are, a) that's cool and efficient and b) it's kind of scary to think that the computer can distinguish a human face in pictures, well maybe not scary, I probably just watched the Terminator too many times. 

I also looked at what other options, as it stands Picasa is free and has lots of features, but there is another site that I feel would be better for a classroom setting. The application I looked at is called Pictoma.  I think this one really demonstrates what the Web 2.0 is about.  Pictoma allows for multiple people to upload to the same place.  A classroom activity I could think of is to have the students do a project where they say, take a picture of your local court house, and then compare.  The idea being looking at different ways they took pictures, different angles, and then tie it into a say a Government class.  The downside is the cost,  while it is only $24 a year unless you're going to use it to have different people upload photos to the same location, like say a wedding, all the guests could post their pictures they took for you at no cost to them.  For Picasa, 20GB of storage space was only $5 and also ties in to other Google services such as email and document storage, for my current needs Google's the place.  

Homework time! RSS feeds ...

Wow... I've known about RSS feeds for some time but have never really tried to use them.  RSS feeds translated to normal speak; basically means instead of having to go look at 10 different websites you can check the content updated through your RSS Reader.  Clearly this seems like a good idea, instead of going to page after page, you have a central location to check all the updates. You can then browse through articles based  on where they came from or just look at all of them.  Again my old school internet bias has prevented me from trying out this technology, but I've been impressed so far.  I use Google Reader, most websites that provide RSS feeds support it, but there are a variety of different programs.  I started by adding the sites that I frequently check, I have a whole section of bookmarks that I check on a multiple times daily.  I used it through out most of the day, check it as each time I noticed a new Feed pop up.  After using it for about a week now I've come to several conclusions.  First, it can be a bit overwhelming, for example, on a regular morning my reader has about 300+ articles.  That's a lot to go through, but which the tools in Google reader, I can get around that by just checking the sites I'm really interested in, then marking the others as read.  Secondly, this is a great tool for keeping yourself updated on multiple things.  You are notified in your reader as soon as something new happens, meaning you can keep yourself updated on new changes.  I can see this a a benefit to the class room (i.e. create a "homework" blog and have all your student's parents subscribe, that way they could see what their child is supposed to be doing and if you make a change to the assignment, they're notified).  My advice is to not let yourself get overwhelmed, subscribing to news sites will keep you up-to-the minute updated, but can easily overwhelm you.  Use the tools the RSS Reader has to offer, check individual sites,  instead of trying to read your whole "new articles" section all at once.  Google Reader also makes it easy to share the article with your friends through Google Buzz if you use Google email, or email the article to someone.  It also gives you the ability to comment on the article when you share. 

Chatroulette ... the internets new low...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/22/chatroulette.random.chat/

" On Chatroulette, a new and controversial Web site, every click lands you in a face-to-face video conversation with a random stranger.


The setup is simple: Activate your webcam and click "play." Then, as people from all over the world pop up one at a time in a box on your screen, you decide whether or not to chat with them. If you don't like the looks of things, click "next" and the site shuffles you to someone new.

The people you meet could be friendly. During a recent CNN test of the site, a man from France popped up on the screen wearing a jester's hat and telling jokes in French. Two men dressed as skeletons were having a dance party to techno music and flashing lights. A slouched-over man in Tunisia said he was tired because he'd been on the site for four hours.

But the stranger Chatroulette sends you could just as easily be naked -- or even masturbating in front of the camera, which is the case rather frequently..."

Wow... Just wow... why would you subject yourself to something that invasive ... Penny Arcade even touched on it with this comic and related story.  Personally I think it's scary.

I am this cat...