Light at the End of the Tunnel

About 15 years ago I was invited to NCAR’s computational math and science fair. The keynote speaker that day was the director of computer science at NCAR/UCAR, Bill Buzbee, (also my father-in-law). That day he spoke of a new innovation called the World Wide Web and how it would be changing our lives. He even took me up to his office to show my how I could access NASA’s web site or look at his family picture online. My wife and I just shrugged our shoulders and said, “So?” Fifteen years later no one can imagine their lives without Google, EBay, Amazon, or Wikipedia.
I guess the real question we should be asking is: “what will we as educators be begging for in five to ten years”? Some of the tools we played with in this class will die away because they have little demand or are difficult to use. Others will become part of our everyday tool boxes in the classroom. Clarity of foresight can help, but we should be as up to date with the technology as we can because our teaching experience will change regardless of whether we’re prepared.
As I approach the end of the requirements for this class I realize that most of the apprehension I had was of my own imagination. (Some of it was real, however). All of it prepared me some for the changes that are surely coming my way.
Finally, one of my constant gripes had to do with the collage of user names and passwords that I have now created. My approach to solving this problem was to write some of them down on pieces of paper and stick them in my school bag. I was recently informed by a fellow student of this class that Yahoo has a way of storing and entering those codes in automatically. Guess that’s one of my next steps.