STSD Curriculum & Technology Update

Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.

Smart Classrooms and Classroom for the Future

Click on the audio file link below to learn more about these to Salisbury initiatives for 2007-08.

Smart Classrooms and Classrooms for the Future
This file is 8:00 long and 7.3 MB.

If you’d like to join the conversation, fill in the form below.  Because of spam appearing on this blog, comments will be “moderated” but will be posted in their entirety.

Thanks for reading this week!

New Format for Curriculum and Technology Updates

Welcome to the 2007-08 school year! During the summer, there has been much activity in our district - from curriculum planning to Summer Academy offerings and technology upgrades. As time takes us through this coming year and things start to shift, there will surely be much more to share. Last year, you received a weekly email titled Instructional Technology Update. This year, regular updates continue, including information tied to both curriculum and technology initiatives. Louise and I will be posting items of interest as well as highlighting instruction in Salisbury classrooms. We look forward to communicating with you in this manner throughout the year. If you have suggestions for articles or have ideas on how we can best use this form of communication, please feel free to email Louise or me.

Over the summer I shared this article with some of our staff: Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Extend Human Lifespan. Here are some of Kurzweil’s expectations for the future:

1. Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the late 2030s;
2. By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;
3. In 15 years, human longevity will be greatly extended. By the 2020s, we’ll be adding a year of longevity or more for every year that passes;
4. In the same timeframe, we’ll routinely be in virtual reality environments. Instead of making a cell call, we could “meet” someone in a virtual world and take a walk on a virtual beach and chat. Business meetings and conference calls will be held in calming or inspiring virtual locations;
5. When you’re walking down the street and see someone you’ve met before, background information about that person will pop up on your glasses or in the periphery of your vision;
6. Instead of spending hours in front of a desktop machine, computers will be more ingrained in our environment. For instance, computer monitors could be replaced by projections onto our retinas or on a virtual screen hovering in the air;
7. Scientists will be able to rejuvenate all of someone’s body tissues and organs by transforming their skin cells into youthful versions of other cell types;
8. Need a little boost? Kurzweil says scientists will be able to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and then introduce them into our bodies, all without surgery. As part of what he calls the “emerging field of rejuvenation medicine,” new tissue and organs will be built out of cells that have been made younger;
9. Got heart trouble? No problem, says Kurzweil. “We’ll be able to create new heart cells from your skin cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated, young heart with your own DNA”;
10. One trick we’ll have to master is staying ahead of the game. Kurzweil warns that terrorists could, obviously, use this same technology against us. For example, they could build and spread a bioengineered biological virus that’s highly powerful and stealthy.

And if you think these expectations are off the mark or too far in the future, check out this short video on how far we’ve come in developing new prosthetic arms. Fascinating!

Through using this weblog format, it is our hope to engage you in dialogue about the various items we write about. This is a great opportunity to share some of the reading apprenticeship strategies from the past few days and make your thinking transparent. What did you connect with; what questions do you have?

To start participating, fill in the form below. If you’re more comfortable being anonymous, create a pen name and fictitious email. Because of spam appearing on this blog, comments will be “moderated” but will be posted in their entirety.

Thanks for reading this week!

Reading blogs

A great way to learn about new thinking in the area of schools, technology and learning is to read a few blogs.

What is a blog? Wikipedia says: “A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.” That’s it in its simplest terms.

Two blogs that are relevant for our conversation:

• Digital Digs
• Dangerously Irrelevant

There are many others out there also.