# data[].attributes.body
Choosing teaching is more than a professional decision; it is a commitment to knowledge, learning, and the growth of others. It is entering a world where each day brings new challenges, but also opportunities to transform lives.

# data[].attributes.body
Being a teacher means recognizing that education is not just about transmitting information, but inspiring, motivating, and awakening curiosity in students.

# data[].attributes.body
It is understanding that each student has their own story, their own way of learning, and their own dreams: these are aspects of education that excite me, that motivated me to take education not just as a profession, but as a path that leads me to inspire and guide, to shape individuals to be part of a more critical, creative, and humane society.

# data[].attributes.body
My past experience with technology reminds me of my first computer, which was significantly different from the current ones. They were larger, heavier, and less powerful. Floppy disks were used to store information. The computers were rudimentary compared to today’s.

# data[].attributes.body
I remember that the first time I handled a computer, I panicked when pressed a key

# data[].attributes.body
The internet has also been part of my experience. It has allowed me to obtain a wide range of benefits in the areas of work, education, and social interaction. It has enabled me to access information: to learn about any topic of interest. It facilitates connection with people anywhere in the world through emails, video calls, and social networks. I have been able to navigate through online course platforms that allow me to learn new skills regardless of where I am. It also allows me to buy and sell products. It has enabled me to work from home, making it easier and more practical. ...

# data[].attributes.body
Using a cell phone was also a technological experience that revolutionized my life. It was easier to learn and understand. It made personal and professional communication easier.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
12 Most Important Technologies Since 1990 – AlleyWatch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I recently read Walt Mossberg’s last column in The Wall Street Journal. I always enjoyed his take on consumer technology and his belief that technology need not be so difficult to use. Since he began his stint over 2 decades ago, technology has seen incredible changes, and in many ways his call for simpler-to-use products has become a reality. When you consider the ubiquity of computing devices in our everyday lives from mobile devices to wearable tech to apps in the cloud, you cannot help but agree that we have arrived as a technology-oriented society. Mossberg made a strong case for his list of top consumer products over his time as a columnist at the Journal. Outside of the Apple MessagePad, I, and most others I know, have used them all. It made me wonder though, what would be the most important, innovative and disruptive technologies over that time? They are not one and the same, as technology gets to the core upon which most products are built upon. When you consider products like the iPad, it would not have been possible without a myriad of technological innovations. In the same vein as Mossberg, I am taking a stab at the 12 most important technologies to come along since 1990. All of these have had immense impact in changing the way we view the world, the way we interact with each other and the way we work. Some are visible to most, but some are behind the scenes, guiding along the advances of other products and services to become an important foundational innovation. Either way, these technologies had an undeniable influence in shaping the course of humanity now and will continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, without further ado, here are my views on those 12 technology innovations: The Web - The Internet had already been going for some time as people were accessing Usenet groups and were exposed to the idea through pop culture such as movies like “War Games.” But it was still a very tiny niche and not easy for the general public to grasp. That all changed with the advent of the World Wide Web and the Web browser in 1991. It would still take several years for it to become something, but I remember clicking around the early Web using Mosaic and thinking how cool this was. Little did most of us know that the Web would become one of the most powerful and disruptive mediums since the advent of the printing press and the underpinning of entirely new industries. Email - This is where work happens. That is what it might seem like, but when I had my first email account it seemed like it was merely an easy way to leave messages for friends. Now it is pretty much the predominant messaging system with 144 billion messages sent per day used for everything from personal to business to marketing to rich Nigerian princes giving away their wealth. And while you may call it the bane of your existence (studies have said it takes up 28 percent of our work day), there is no denying that email is an integral part of our lives, as we furtively battle toward inbox zero. Search - Ever use Archie or Gopher? I am probably dating myself here, but that was what I first used to search the Web. Then came commercial offerings by Lycos, Excite, Infoseek and AltaVista. But it was Google that eventually won the search battle by the early 2000s with its Page Rank algorithm. It was search that finally brought some level of order to the unruly and ever growing Web that the directories and portals could not. Search also spawned entire new industries as marketers realized the power of organic search and search advertising. It has been the bread and butter of Google’s business ever since, allowing the company to pursue even more ambitious ideas to become one of the great pillars of the tech innovation ecosystem. Blogging - In the early days of the Web, there was not all that much content to speak of. You could browse around easily enough, but for what? Eventually people started to post things online, sometimes personal journals, sometimes news, sometimes essays on various subjects. By the late ’90s, the term “blog” became a permanent part of the tech lexicon, and platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger emerged to support these intrepid writers. Now it is big business, having created careers and conferences and companies. And it has upended the world of journalism, becoming as relevant as established media in breaking and spreading news. The MP3 - I used to have the most killer CD collection when things like that mattered. Now it seems like everyone is renting music online. None of that would have been possible though without the MP3. Really I should state lossy compression, as there are a number of formats used. But it was the MP3 that become the de facto standard and disrupted the world of music as much as the Web disrupted newspapers. The MP3 popularized file sharing, decoupled the entire music economic supply chain, gave Apple it’s first killer product in two decades and changed the way we listen and consume music forever. eCommerce - The first iterations of Web browsers and Internet technology only accommodated the most rudimentary of websites, which meant lots of text interspersed with images. Then a few things happened. First, Netscape incorporated SSL into its first browser for secure transmissions. Then the National Science Foundation dropped its objections to commerce on the Internet. Then HTML 2.0 added GET and POST form submission in 1995, changing the level of interactivity one could enable in a website. Now, a fair criticism would be to say that eCommerce is not one technology, but many technologies such as payments and encryption. But taken together it is a technological trend that has led to over $1 trillion in transactions online and changed the nature of retail commerce forever with new models of local mobile commerce and the sharing (peer-to-peer) economy that is all the current rage. 3G Network - We all remember that scene in “Wall Street” when Gordon Gekko was talking to Bud Fox on a phone while walking on the beach. How cool was that—even if it looked like a brick! Cell phones were pretty cool and gained wide acceptance in the ’90s. But when 3G networks came on the scene, it changed the nature of how one could use these devices. They were not just a way to communicate via voice and text from the road, but a way to get information and do other useful stuff. But that would not have been possible without the bandwidth afforded by 3G networks, which finally made data transfer possible to support email, Web browsing and more. The Cloud - This one could be a stretch given how much abuse this term has taken in the hands of overzealous marketers. The cloud, in many ways, has always existed from the earliest days of computer networking. And like eCommerce, there are many component technologies such as virtualization that make the cloud possible. It was in the 90’s though that the concept started to come into the common tech vernacular to cover various hosted services and the earliest SaaS providers. But it was Amazon that changed the game by turning the cloud into a true utility with the release of AWS in 2002 (and EC2 in 2006), allowing anyone to cheaply host anything, including Web and mobile apps. AWS now powers a huge percentage of the Web 2.0 economy and has been instrumental in the recent explosive growth in tech startups. SaaS - Hand in hand with the cloud would be Software-as-a-Service. Before this, the cloud was generally considered to be nothing more than a hosting relationship usually in a VPN configuration for companies. The idea that software could be “shared” like one shared a server seemed antithetical to most companies in the late ’90s, but Salesforce.com made it the core of their entire strategy. The real brilliance was not merely creating a multi-tenant environment to share software in the cloud, but “renting” it to customers on a subscription basis. Now, they are one of the largest software companies in the world, having made SaaS business as usual as Excel spreadsheets, and forever changed the way businesses buy and deploy software. Social Networking - By far the biggest trend in technology over the past several years, other than mobile, has been social networking. By 2005, there were quite a few popular social networking sites, and the Internet was clearly happening. However the Internet was just not essential for most people. Facebook altered that forever by putting social networking at the forefront, connecting humanity together with digital connections without regard to location or relationship. And with connectivity came frictionless sharing of content and media, changing the nature of how we perceive privacy and trust as well as how we interact with news and information and each other. Open APIs - Social networking would arguably not have been as disruptive if it had not been for the advent and popularization of open APIs (application programming interfaces). There is nothing new when it comes to the concept of APIs, which have existed in various forms since the days of the mainframe. What did change was who could access those APIs and what information could be exchanged and how easy it was to build these integrations. Companies like Facebook and Twitter made their APIs a core growth strategy, creating an ecosystem that encouraged developers to connect their own apps into these major networks and in turn creating other large companies like Zygna. Now, open API’s are even causing governments and private companies to open up their own troves of data to the public, fueling the burgeoning big data movement. And how big is big data exactly? It is now a $15 billion a year industry and growing rapidly. Mobile Computing - While the increased bandwidth of 3G was critical for the adoption of data services, it was new devices themselves that unleashed the full potential of computing on the go and all the time. We may laugh at Blackberry now, but they were largely responsible for popularizing smart phones with stellar email and messaging apps. Then Apple and Google got into the mix with full-fledged, handheld supercomputers that could do anything one could do on a laptop, fueled by vast digital media collections and app stores. Along with open APIs, mobile devices have accelerated the pace of social networks and SaaS, driving even more need for cloud resources. Just as powerful as email has become in changing the nature of how we work, so will mobile computing change how we work, but this time for the better. Bonus - these are nascent innovations that are still evolving but important to mention: Bitcoin - Maybe it would be better to state this more generically as cryptocurrency, but Bitcoin has all the mindshare and attention and capital at this juncture. However, we are still very early, given Bitcoin came into being in 2009 and is still a niche idea talked about heavily by a niche group of enthusiasts, investors and entrepreneurs. This is the next big bet in technology, but it is still too early to state that this is a game changing technology. One thing is for sure though, if it does succeed, it could disrupt the very core of the international banking system, global payment systems and government controlled fiat currencies. What does that portend? The greatest exchange of capital and wealth and power we have seen since the dawn of the industrial age. 3D Printing - Like Bitcoin, we are still in the very early days of this market. I would call this current era the first generation of the technology where there are plenty of hobbyists and growing commercial usage, but it is still the tiniest sliver of total manufacturing output. However, the potential for 3D printing cannot be understated in reinvigorating the manufacturing industry. We are slowly moving from mass production supported by massive transportation and logistics infrastructures (with all its pollution) to just-in-time, mass customization using local resources within local communities. We are not there yet, but that train is leaving the station. It has been quite a whirlwind of change in just 24 years. Back then, we thought computers were “big boxy things” on which you used spreadsheets and word documents. Now we cannot escape the pull of technology and computers anywhere we go, as the first digital native generation starts entering into the workforce knowing nothing different. What will come to pass in the next couple of decades I could only guess, but it may very well be as strange and exciting and surprising as the past couple of decades. Here’s to the future! This article was originally published on Strong Opinions, a blog by Birch Ventures for the NYC tech startup community. Image credit: CC by Timothy Wells

# data[].attributes.body
" KNOWLEDGE IS THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON TO CHANGE THE WORLD".

# data[].attributes.body
Learning teaching methodologies and pedagogical techniques that enable me to adapt to the needs of students.

# data[].attributes.body
Acquiring skills that allow me to help students develop their knowledge and values for the future.

# data[].attributes.body
Understanding technological advancements in education.

# data[].attributes.body
Finding the ideal way to support personal and emotional development – Helping students strengthen their self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills.

# data[].attributes.body
The integration of technology in the classroom is a fascinating topic, full of hopes and also concerns.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Is Technology Important In Education?

# data[].attributes.body
On one hand, it represents a bridge to new forms of more dynamic and interactive learning. Digital tools, artificial intelligence, and educational platforms can personalize teaching, adapting to the rhythm and style of each student. In addition, immediate access to global information broadens horizons and fosters creativity. In that sense, technology has the potential to transform education into a dynamic, motivating, and analytical experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://news.stanford.edu/report/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/11/antero-garcia-edited.mp3
Listen to the essay, as read by Antero Garcia, associate professor in the Graduate School of Education.
As a professor of education and a former public school teacher, I've seen digital tools change lives in schools.

I've documented the ways mobile technology like phones can transform student engagement in my own classroom.

I've explored how digital tools might network powerful civic learning and dialogue for classrooms across the country - elements of education that are crucial for sustaining our democracy today.

And, like everyone, I've witnessed digital technologies make schooling safer in the midst of a global pandemic. Zoom and Google Classroom, for instance, allowed many students to attend classrooms virtually during a period when it was not feasible to meet in person.

So I want to tell you that I think technologies are changing education for the better and that we need to invest more in them - but I just can't.

Given the substantial amount of scholarly time I've invested in documenting the life-changing possibilities of digital technologies, it gives me no pleasure to suggest that these tools might be slowly poisoning us. Despite their purported and transformational value, I've been wondering if our investment in educational technology might in fact be making our schools worse.

Let me explain.

When I was a classroom teacher, I loved relying on the latest tools to create impressive and immersive experiences for my students. We would utilize technology to create class films, produce social media profiles for the Janie Crawfords, the Holden Caulfields, and other literary characters we studied, and find playful ways to digitally share our understanding of the ideas we studied in our classrooms.

As a teacher, technology was a way to build on students' interests in pop culture and the world around them. This was exciting to me.

But I've continued to understand that the aspects of technology I loved weren't actually about technology at all - they were about creating authentic learning experiences with young people. At the heart of these digital explorations were my relationships with students and the trust we built together.

"Part of why I've grown so skeptical about this current digital revolution is because of how these tools reshape students' bodies and their relation to the world around them."

I do see promise in the suite of digital tools that are available in classrooms today. But my research focus on platforms - digital spaces like Amazon, Netflix, and Google that reshape how users interact in online environments - suggests that when we focus on the trees of individual tools, we ignore the larger forest of social and cognitive challenges.

Most people encounter platforms every day in their online social lives. From the few online retail stores where we buy groceries to the small handful of sites that stream our favorite shows and media content, platforms have narrowed how we use the internet today to a small collection of Silicon Valley behemoths. Our social media activities, too, are limited to one or two sites where we check on the updates, photos, and looped videos of friends and loved ones.

These platforms restrict our online and offline lives to a relatively small number of companies and spaces - we communicate with a finite set of tools and consume a set of media that is often algorithmically suggested. This centralization of internet - a trend decades in the making - makes me very uneasy.

From willfully hiding the negative effects of social media use for vulnerable populations to creating tools that reinforce racial bias, today's platforms are causing harm and sowing disinformation for young people and adults alike. The deluge of difficult ethical and pedagogical questions around these tools are not being broached in any meaningful way in schools - even adults aren't sure how to manage their online lives.

You might ask, "What does this have to do with education?" Platforms are also a large part of how modern schools operate. From classroom management software to attendance tracking to the online tools that allowed students to meet safely during the pandemic, platforms guide nearly every student interaction in schools today. But districts are utilizing these tools without considering the wider spectrum of changes that they have incurred alongside them.

For example, it might seem helpful for a school to use a management tool like Classroom Dojo (a digital platform that can offer parents ways to interact with and receive updates from their family's teacher) or software that tracks student reading and development like Accelerated Reader for day-to-day needs. However, these tools limit what assessment looks like and penalize students based on flawed interpretations of learning.

Another problem with platforms is that they, by necessity, amass large swaths of data. Myriad forms of educational technology exist - from virtual reality headsets to e-readers to the small sensors on student ID cards that can track when students enter schools. And all of this student data is being funneled out of schools and into the virtual black boxes of company databases.

Part of why I've grown so skeptical about this current digital revolution is because of how these tools reshape students' bodies and their relation to the world around them. Young people are not viewed as complete human beings but as boxes checked for attendance, for meeting academic progress metrics, or for confirming their location within a school building. Nearly every action that students perform in schools - whether it's logging onto devices, accessing buildings, or sharing content through their private online lives - is noticed and recorded. Children in schools have become disembodied from their minds and their hearts. Thus, one of the greatest and implicit lessons that kids learn in schools today is that they must sacrifice their privacy in order to participate in conventional, civic society.

The pandemic has only made the situation worse. At its beginnings, some schools relied on software to track students' eye movements, ostensibly ensuring that kids were paying attention to the tasks at hand. Similarly, many schools required students to keep their cameras on during class time for similar purposes. These might be seen as in the best interests of students and their academic growth, but such practices are part of a larger (and usually more invisible) process of normalizing surveillance in the lives of youth today.

I am not suggesting that we completely reject all of the tools at our disposal - but I am urging for more caution. Even the seemingly benign resources we might use in our classrooms today come with tradeoffs. Every Wi-Fi-connected, "smart" device utilized in schools is an investment in time, money, and expertise in technology over teachers and the teaching profession.

Our focus on fixing or saving schools via digital tools assumes that the benefits and convenience that these invisible platforms offer are worth it.

But my ongoing exploration of how platforms reduce students to quantifiable data suggests that we are removing the innovation and imagination of students and teachers in the process.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Technology might be making education worse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listen to the essay, as read by Antero Garcia, associate professor in the Graduate School of Education.

# data[].attributes.body
However, not everything is positive without proper implementation. There are concerns about excessive dependence on devices, the distractions they can generate, and even a decrease in critical thinking if students rely too much on automated answers. There are also concerns about equitable access, as not all students have the same technological conditions at home. And, of course, the role of the teacher should never be reduced or replaced by technology, but rather complemented by it.

# data[].attributes.body
Zoom has revolutionized the way people communicate and work, especially in an increasingly digital world. Zoom has allowed me to hold meetings, classes, and virtual events regardless of distance. It has been essential in this stage of education, providing interactive tools for teachers and students.

# data[].attributes.body
The true challenge is to find the balance: harnessing the power of technology without losing the essence of human learning.