Edustructional Technology

The Past I still remember the first time that I saw a true virtual reality device.  I was a teenager wandering around Six Flags Over Georgia and, wedged between a ski ball machine and some other carnival games, was a boy wandering around an extremely small walled-in circle with this contraption completely covering his head and his hands in some sort of awkward gloves.  As I watched, he tilted his head and held up his hands like a zombie while walking slowly around the circle.  As a young tech nerd, I was completely entranced.  I had to try this "Virtual Reality" game. This is how cool it looked! After the boy finished, I plopped down $12 (no small sum for a 13 year old in the early 90s) and played.  I put the Vader-like helmet on my head and two small video screens smeared with the oil of countless other sweaty teenagers presented a landscape of absurdly large polygons meant to resemble an environment populated by "characters."  The gloves made it appear th...

Quick!  Name 3 technologies commonly used in education.  You probably came up with: computer (for teacher and student use), iPads, and interactive whiteboards.  Some of you may have said TV/DVD player as well or something else. While computers and iPads (which are really just computers too) have impacted education, the interactive whiteboard (IWB) has not.  The story of the IWB is a cautionary tale about the adoption of technology in education. The Rise of the IWB Around the time I was in college (late 90s, early 00s), IWBs began showing up in university classrooms.  Usually, they appeared in physics, chemistry, or other science/math classrooms.  The assumption was that a more technically minded field would use technology more than a liberal arts field (a wrong assumption).  At that time, IWBs did not proliferate.  They were still in just a limited number of college classrooms and were used sparingly.  In five years, that changed dramatically...