Lottery

A lot of us play this game in our personal lives.  "If I won the lottery I'd buy a house on a beach, a convertible."  We probably don't even realize we do it in our professional lives.  I just finished one of those conversations with a friend.  She and I have those conversations often.  "If I could get my students anything at all, I would get them..."  There are many things that stay true on our list.  Unlimited field trips and building their personal library are a couple.  Recently, technology has made it onto our list.  Just like we would want our students to have a personal library filled with books that belonged to them, we would want them to have their own device.  A device they could bring home and return to school, for use in both places.  Seamless learning.

After the conversation, I sat down with my new NOOK Color. I am playing around with it, learning the ins and outs.  As I am playing (I mean reading) one of my downloaded books I notice that there are so many things you can do.  You can bookmark pages, many pages, not just the one you left off reading.  You can highlight text.  You can write yourself a note about the text.  You can send a quote from the text to a friend.  The same is true for a device that has the NOOK app such as a smartphone or iPod.  I am noticing this and  remember back to the Apple Learning Tour I recently attended.  You can do many of those same things on an iPad.  And I am wondering.  Why aren't we putting a device in the hands of every child?