Distance Education

Pros of having virtual schools:

1. Children that are not ready to interact in a social setting can still participate in a good learning environment.
2. Parents are able to monitor more closely their child's education.
3. If a child were to fall behind, they would have less trouble catching up than they would in an actual classroom.
4. Families that have to travel a lot can still give their child a great learning experience.
5. The virtual schools have really great material, and can give children a very unique learning experience that they may not get in a crowded classroom.

Cons of having virtual schools:

1. Student's may not get the same social skills that they would acquire being in a normal school setting.
2. It may be easier for children to miss out on important lessons because they may not be covered in their virtual curriculum.
3. Students may have a hard time when they finally go to a real school, because they are used to a different learning style.
4. Student's cannot receive all of the same services that they would in a real school. (Counseling for example)
5. It may be difficult for some students to learn when they can be so relaxed and easily distracted in their own home.

I think that you could determine a student's readiness to participate in distance education by their attention span, maturity, and desire to learn. If a student is patient enough to be in front of a computer for long periods of time, then they probably would not have trouble with the virtual school. In order to be able to teach in a virtual school, you would have to be a great communicator because students may not be able to ask you as many questions after a lesson as they could in a real classroom.

Emergent Technologies

I think that one of the most important emergent technologies for education is the use of wireless internet. Although this technology has been around for a while now, as more and more schools equip their classrooms with wireless capabilities it will have a big impact on education. This site, http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/ , gives a lot of information about wireless. This technology will have an impact on classrooms because students will be able to use labtops to work from their desks, and use internet for homework and lessons. Coupling this technology with the use of E-books could make the use of physical textbooks obsolete in the future.
In some newer schools across America, every student has their own computer at their desk, and the class is geared toward learning with that technology. Students don't use textbooks, they follow along on websites with their teacher. This technology opens them up to endless opportunities of unique assignments and lessons that students without the technology would not have the opportunity to be exposed to.
Another very important emerging technology is the use of e-books, or electronic books. This site, http://www.ebooks.com/, is full of ebooks, as well as information about them and how to use them. Using ebooks could be a very good tool for a classroom. Instead of having to buy 30 books for a classroom, you could just buy the ebook and make it available to all of the students in the class. Not only can this save money for the teacher and the school, it would allow the students to use the book both at home and in the classroom without having to worry about losing or damaging a real book.
I think that this is one of the most important technologies for a classroom, especially if using it for textbooks. College students spend thousands of dollars on textbooks, but if a classroom could collectively buy the e-textbook and make it available to all of the students in the class, the students would be able to save a lot of money, making college more affordable.
Video conferencing is yet another very useful emerging technology. This site, http://www.lifesize.com/, offers a service of High Definition, life size, video conferencing. This is just one example of a site that offers this type of service. Using video conferencing can be very important for a classroom. A class could communicate with other classrooms all across the world to do various collaboration projects, or just to look in on how students learn in other parts of the world. Another thing this could be useful for is if a student had to miss some school for whatever reason, they could tune in to the video conference of the class, and not fall behind as a result.
In the future, using this could be very beneficial to my classroom. This would open the door for my students to have tons of opportunities that students without this technology could ever be exposed to. Using this technology could be like a new age pen pal system, instead of writing letters to a student in another country and waiting for it to be delivered and to hear back, you could instantly talk to your pen pal online and get to see them at the same time using video conferencing. There are tons of things that this could be used for, and this is something that I will try to use in my classroom in the future.

Kiosk

I thought the Kiosk project was a pretty good experience. Overall, it was a fairly easy, but informative assignment. While doing the kiosk, I came up with a lot of ideas of how I could use this assignment in my own classroom someday. In addition to creating my own, I really enjoyed looking at other kiosks, too. Everyone got really creative with their animations, sounds, and supplemental videos. With a little more time I feel that the kiosks could have been even better.