Technology of the Future Comes to Today

While I was in Logan for my graduate classes this week, I had the opportunity to visit the Adele & Dale Young Education Technology Center (YETC) on the campus of the Utah State University. The YETC is a resource center for the College of Education and Human Services, houses open-access computer facilities, a K-12 curriculum materials library, a NASA Educator Resource Center, as well as collections of educational technology products.

Our first stop, was a PC computer room where we explored the Teacher Link website. (http://www.teacherlink.usu.edu/TLYETC/index.html) This site takes users to resources that teachers can immediately use in their classrooms, but teacher or not, you’ve got to visit the Clip Art section which contains over 1 million free pieces and backgrounds to use in presentations, newsletters, etc. Be sure to visit the NASA link as well where you can see what’s happening at the Space Centers in real time. If you run into any pages that require a password, just contact the YETC center or email Nathan.Smith@usu.edu and they can help you.

Next we visited the Mac computer center. I used to use a Mac, but so many educational programs were not compatible all those years ago when I bought my first computer, so I abandoned the system I loved. Now I may go back! These computers read both Mac and PC programs, and the programs are easy to use. In less than 5 minutes, I learned how to use iMovie and made a little film of myself, using the built in camera and music tracks.

Our third computer room took us back to PCs where we learned about Vegas Movie Maker, a professional quality editing system that lets budding film makers produce independent movies on DVD. One of the latest things in computer use that they demonstrated is to have two monitors connected to your computer so that you can work in several programs at once without needing to switch from tab to tab.

All of this technology surrounding me made me feel like I was on the set of Star Trek, but it was also exciting to learn about the capabilities that home computer systems can have today. Now I want to go spend a few hours learning how to use some of these new programs so that I can introduce them to my students not too long into the future.