Information Overloaded

As many of you know, this New Brunswick winter has been especially taxing for a multitude of reasons. I am running out of places to put the snow in my driveway, my snowblower and broke after storm #2, and I am down a shovel. To make it worse, the St. Paddy’s Day storm is just around the corner.

I digress.

A month ago, Jeff and I were scheduled to present to the University of New Brunswick students on Technology and the Provincial Acceptable Use Policy. We had never given this presentation before and were counting on being able to work together on the Tuesday and then present the following day.

But school was cancelled!

Usually storm days are celebration days in my house. Not that day. Buried under mounds and mounds of snow, there was no chance that we would be able to meet to plan our presentation. Let me tell you, the panic was setting in!

Then I remembered Google Presentations.I had remembered Vicki Davis, a presenter at the ACTEM conference in Maine, using Google Presentations, so I thought I would give it a try. Jeff and I were able to work on the presentation together in real time and finish our slides in a few hours…pain free! The best part was the collaboration that Google Presentations offers. We would not have been able to do this with PowerPoint.

The screenshot above shows over 400 revisions that we made. We were even able to make a .pdf version of our presentation in the event of internet failure. The students loved it.

Take that cruel winter! Ha!

I have never been one of those readers who savors every word and punctuation mark of books I read. Instead, I devour novels voraciously, gobble the ideas, and then reach for more. I attribute this type of reading to a Masters Degree in English Literature, where I was required to read an unrealistic amount of novels in a short amount of time. [Insert Apology to Ezra Pound Here].

I digress.

Lately I find myself slipping even further into that bleary-eyed, sloppy processing of the written word. I blame this, in part, on my Google Reader! I am reading, on average, 25 blogs per day. I skim and scan like the information vulture I am, for neat ideas to use in the classroom, new software to try, and various interesting things about the world (thanks Deputy Dog).

But I am here to tell you that sloppy reading can be dangerous!

Picture this. I am reading this blog post about Google Educator tools which immediately peeks my interest. So I click on the site where I discover that Google is promoting something called Google Lunar X Prize. My eyes skim over the first sentence or two….I process the following:

robotic rover
reality for your students
prize
stimulate interest in space and exploration
This looks sweet! Immediately, I copy the link and send it to the Technology teacher at one of our middle schools and note to him the nice prize. He has an interest in Mars Rover project with Lego that he does with his kids. I thought this would be perfect for him.

He sends me back a cute reply: “ after reading the “FINE PRINT” the only way we could pull this off is if NASA were teaching the Tech program and we had a launch tower by the shop door!”

So I immediately revisit the site….hehe….and read more carefully only to discover that the X Prize is for privately funded independent teams to send a robotic rover to the moon! The prize is 30 million dollars! Gee Mr. T, who says we can’t build a Rover and launch it in Oromocto! Sheesh! I do have to admit a touch of embarrassment.

So, in the light of all this, I have made a new “New Year’s Resolution”:

I am slowing down; I am becoming one with the blog post. I will make a concerted effort to abstain from devouring everything my greedy little eyes see.

Otherwise, I am going to be eating crow!