Google Wave Invite Giveaway!

I have 10 Google Wave beta invites to give away. Thats right; 10 lucky people will get Google Wave beta invites, courtesy of myself and Noah Purdy.  Noah is a fellow CIS student at RMU.  He’s a super nice guy, and I thank him for helping to make this possible.

Google Wave is a communication tool aimed at making it easy and simple to collaborate with multiple people. There’s really no other way to describe it besides to direct you to this video, and to the site, which has a nice introductory video on Google Wave and what it’s about.

To be entered in this contest, you’ll need to do one of two things: tweet the post, or comment on it.

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Technology and Education: We need to better integrate the two, and fast!

Technology is something that almost everyone is at least semi-familiar with. Be it something as simple as turning on a television or a computer, or something as complicated as editing a kernel extension in Terminal, we’re all familiar with some sort of technology. Regardless of skill level, the reason we all are experiencing technology in our lives every day is because we’re living in the 21st century: the digital age, the millennium, the conceptual era. One place that has yet to really see the full potential of technology is education.  In the education sector, technology seems as though its trying to be used as a way of learning, not as a tool for learning.  There’s quite a large distinction between those two uses, and many educators are unsure of the dividing line. Our schools aren’t transforming student learning or differentiating instruction through the use of technology.  They’re simply throwing devices into the classroom without a clear plan or vision as to how they plan to use them.  In fact, our schools haven’t changed much at all over the decades.   (more…)

Google Announces Chrome OS

Google held a rather small event today to announce its new Chrome OS.  The OS isn’t even in beta yet, but they wanted to give developers and members of the open source community a very early chance to check it out.  Rather than type out a really long post about it, I’m just going to give a bulleted list of all the important information.  Much courtesy to Engadget for initially summing up the live event.  I will say, however, that the concept is interesting, if nothing else.  I’m still very wary of our society’s increasing reliance on the cloud.  GMAIL goes down often, for example.  Basing an entire OS off the cloud and storing absolutely nothing locally, quite frankly, scares the crap out of me.  Google said that the limited cloud downtime should equal or be far less in time than that of the average computer downtime due to viruses or other headaches.  Never, ever, have I been unable to access my files on my Mac because it was “down.”  I just wanted to mention that. Click through to get the bulleted list summarizing most of the announcement.

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Verizon’s Ad Campaign Against AT&T

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Verizon’s newly launched ad campaign against AT&T Wireless that targets the iPhone.  Verizon’s marketing team has a smart stategy here – they know that the iPhone is great, so they attack its one and only major weak point, the network.  AT&T’s 3G network, plainly put, is atrocious.  They’ve been making some substantial improvements, and I commend them for that, but their efforts have simply not been enough.  Most of the clamour over the ads come from pundits from both sides claiming they’re misleading, not true, put AT&T in a bad light, etc.  The ads have garnished so much attention, in fact, that AT&T, to no benefit of itself, has decided to sue Verizon over the ads.

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TRETC 2009

TRETC (Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference) 2009 was a huge success and most definitely a lot of fun.  Last year, I had the privilege of having the “Presenter” status on my tag.  I gave a presentation on creating a 21st century student technology leadership team in schools. (See this post).  This year, I had the “Exhibitor” status.
I got to demo two Web 2.0 products, Quizlet and Webnotes, in the Digital Playground.  The Digital Playground was new for this year, and I have to say, it was interesting idea.  Unfortunately, it was given a bad location and many folks didn’t really know what they were supposed to “do” there.  To many, it looked like just some more vendor tables.  That was the problem with it.  If the technology council can integrate some more students next year to show off some of their favorite tools, sort of like I did today, I think the Playground will be much more successful.

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