Blog Task #1

“Video-on Demand” in the classroom, in its current stage, is a great idea that continues to bridge the interest of students, in this case educational programming, with class content. What is particularly innovative and revolutionary about this project is “what distinguishes Baltimore County's effort…the district has convened teams of teachers in each school to brainstorm ways of using the new resources to their fullest potential across each academic discipline.”

Generally, we have been exposed to solitary examples of lone teachers integrating their classrooms with technology, always with extreme success, but they always seemed to be within a domain of technophobes. Now we have an entire district rallying the troops, making curricula that is not only as user friendly as a stapler but fully embraces all of the educational tools available to them…Perhaps the school in Liverpool should have took similar measures? In the not so distant future I can see an entire on-line database of educational “video-on demand” that teachers and students could pull up from anywhere on the planet, probably in a language that it wasn’t recorded in.

The most obvious connection between the three readings is that there is no longer anything traditional about education and for those who think they will be teaching in a manner in which they were taught… you are sorely mistaken (that sentence made me feel cutting edge and old all at the same time). Everything is changing, on so many levels.

It seems that blogs are only part of the picture while the use of technology in the classroom is another part of what we need to do to strive in the flattening of the world. Where the Technorati datum visually conveys the surge of the blogosphere, the Baltimore Project shows us how the uses of technology for education are changing. The way I see it “the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning,”