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April 15, 2003
Trend Watch
By T&L Editors
Food for Thought
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"Education is the food that nourishes the nation's soul. When public officials refuse to provide adequate school resources for the young, it's the same as parents refusing to feed their children."
-Bob Herbert, "The War on Schools," New York Times, March 6, 2003
Wearable Computing Gets Personal
Find yourself drawing a blank when trying to recall the names of your students' parents or those colleagues you see at district meetings? Luckily, the latest in wearable computing technologies may help you store those memories digitally. The Personal Awareness Assistant is a small device designed to be worn on a jacket lapel or collared shirt. Combining a speech recognition engine, two small microphones, a camera, and an optional Global Positioning System, the Personal Awareness Assistant automatically records the names and photographs the faces of people you meet. Once captured, the data is stored in an address book with audio, digital image, date/time stamp, and location. Because the data is stored contextually, you can simply ask, "Who did I meet last Friday?" Within moments, your assistant offers the desired information, making it appear as if you knew it all along.
This Weblog Sponsored By...
A new type of viral marketing may be making its way into your students' lives-and your media literacy classes. Newsweek reports that Dr Pepper/Seven Up, which is using a Weblog to introduce its new line of milk-based products, has recruited six young adults with popular blogs to link to the company's site. In exchange the bloggers, who are in their teens and early 20s, were flown to the company's headquarters in Dallas and given promotional items. Since they're not being paid to link, neither the youths nor Dr Pepper consider the deal to be worthy of a disclosure statement. Whether or not the campaign works remains to be seen. In the meantime, it offers educators yet another tool for teaching students the importance of questioning the information they find on Web sites, even those created by peers.
NCLB Dominates at FETC
There was no escape from No Child Left Behind at this year's Florida Educational Technology Conference, where core curriculum software, instructional management packages, and assessment tools addressing the legislation's requirements took center stage. In particular, online professional development for reading has emerged in a big way-no doubt in response to the Reading First initiative-with Scholastic, Classroom Connect, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston each touting their Web-based training. (Scholastic Red is available now; Classroom Connect and Holt's products will be released this summer.) Even hardware vendors were playing up their role vis-a-vis NCLB, offering professional development, outsourced technology support, and other services.
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