Second Life

The new form of technology I am presenting is Second Life. Second Life is amazing, you can do almost anything there that you can do in real life. I believe that in ten years or even sooner, Second Life will become like Myspace. It has proven this just by looking at the statistics. It was launched in 2003 and it took awhile to take off, but from April 2006 to April 2007 it grew from one million residents to six million residents. It spread like wildfire in only a years time. Second Life allows you to make money, shop, own and sell businesses, and attend school, as well as fly and teleport. I believe that Second Life will grow to booming proportions, but I also believe that it will become just a fad and will die out eventually just like everything else. It will leave an impact though. Children in education today, are starving for more virtual interaction on the computer. Children need more then just our old computer games. Second Life is not just a game; one can learn things about the real world and how things operate, but in a fun way instead of learning it through lecture. I think this would be really fun to use in a classroom, especially in a college or high school business class. Now, back to the impact it will have. I think that the programs that will come out here on in will be virtual and highly interactive. Second Life will inspire programmers to make it even more interactive. I would not be surprised that in ten years from now we could actually touch and smell interactive games. Maybe I'm a little idealistic. The way technology is going now it is not impossible to think that computer games could become that advanced. A lot can happen in ten years. Technology is flourishing more an more and I think with games like Second Life, educators are going to be using the computers more and more in the classroom. One thing I am worried about however, is that I hope for the sake of my job that games like this do not end up being so advanced that there is no longer a need for the teacher; that the game could become so interactive and so real that the kids could forget they are on a computer. I hope that never happens, but it could.

My Fairytale Adventure

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Originally uploaded by jennygenovese1

So in class this week we made a fairytale. Making the slideshow was really fun we made our's really comedic, but I realized that my phone absolutely sucks. I could not send the pictures to Flickr. My phone which is the blackberry curve will not allow you to list an email address as a phone number. I could not put it as a person’s number I had to put it in as an email address and my phone does not have email capabilities. Even though I was sending as MMS it would not send to my Flickr account. I didn't feel stupid about it not being able to work because even my tech savvy teacher couldn't figure it out. The picture I used I stole from my group member because I don't have any pictures. It's one of Ariel's fishy friends from the little mermaid. I really enjoyed making our slideshow I thought ours was very original we took almost all of our own pictures; we only had a couple from the internet. This would be really fun idea to do with older children in a computer class and it's really creative. My favorite part was presenting it because we got to add-lib stuff and we made it fun to watch. We decided we didn't want to completely follow the fairytale storyline.

Reaction to Shift Happens

This video completely shocked me. I have never really thought about how children are being educated with technology today. Technology is going to be something every person is going to need to know how to use in order to survive. I thought the message was very empowering just in the beginning alone when it says that in eight seconds thirty-four babies would be born and asked the question: What will the world be like for them? I was also shocked at some of the statistics. For example, the fact that one hundred percent of college graduates in India speak English. That is amazing, one hundred percent!! Also that in ten years the number one English speaking country in the world will be China. That actually scares me a little. It was also amazing how quickly the computer reached fifty million (4 yrs!) as compared to the radio and television. The video did a great job at showing how much technology is used today and how much people use the Internet as a resource. For example, the video stated the 2.7 billion searches were done on Google alone in one month! I also loved what they said about Myspace being that over 230,000 people join Myspace on a daily basis and if it was a country it would be the eighth largest in the world. The conclusion of the video was also great by reminding us that we need to question our education officials and make sure the children are getting what they need. The people who created this video did a great job at empowering the people who watched it.