Blog 3: I love my iPod

This was such a problem when I was growing up. I was a big exercise freak and I would always love to exercise with music. The problem I always had was my discman. It was rather bulky and didn't allow me to exercise to my FULL potential. But thank the technological gods above, Apple created the savior, the iPod. Now, while the iPod may have benefits for me in my personal life, in my teaching life it is indeed a welcome gift. I am pursuing a career in musical theatre education, and the iPod allows me to bring in music for my students to listen to. CDs are becoming quite precarious in their prices, but with iTunes, the cost to purchase a showtunes soundtrack is either 9.99 or less. That, on a teacher's salery, is a godsend. What makes the iPod both a great output and storage device is the fact that it allows you to store music from CDs you already have in your collection. Who would have guessed that we would now be converting our beloved Compact Discs into little mini mp3 files, only to place them back on a compact disc yet again?

Classmates, we are at a very interesting place in our time. No, I'm not going to bore with you my mindless chatter about where do we place ourselves with technology in the classroom. But seriously think about this, how do we ensure all our students from all different backgrounds of life (economically, culturally, socially) have EQUAL access to technology? We need to seriously ponder this issue. Currently, many schools differ in the level of technology they currently have in their facilities. This gap can be attributed to the difference of property taxes, a key financing tool the government uses for funding schools. How can we ensure technological equality for all sites if we don't have a system of funding that can provide it?

Since last class, I have learned leaps and bounds about Microsoft Word. Usually, I had used word just for its basic purpose of creating word documents to submit to my professors as well as using it for my novel (soon to be coming, well hopefully). But after last week's assignment, I learned that Word has the same tools like Microsoft Publisher. And the great thing about it is that Microsoft Word is readily available to many people compared to Microsoft Publisher. It seems funny how Word had blossomed into this multi purposed application program. When Word first arrived on the technology scene, it was one of the most basic word processing out there. To see how far comes it does one thing for me: It makes me feel like I'm just getting older.