Technology excitement

This is just a quick note to talk about something that excited me yesterday.

I arrived a few minutes late to the ICT lecture and was standing at the back. I felt too self-conscious to pull out my laptop or paper and pen, and then a thought struck me. I have an extension of a cloud-based note-taking application on my phone!

This semester I have been experimenting with taking notes on my laptop for classes. This has been reasonably successful. What I love about the application though is that it saves my notes to an external source and I can access the notes from any device with the program. So on my laptop, or on my desktop, or on a friends computer. Or on my phone! I pulled out my phone and opened the program, added another note to my ICT folder synced from the external storage. Then I started typing down my thoughts about the lecture, and important ideas, and saved it as the lecture drew to a close. I knew if I wanted to look at the notes, or when it came time to add more notes I could open my laptop, or sit at my desktop or pull out my phone and they would be there.

The information thus exists independent of the form of technology used to capture or view it on! The freedom and the thrill of this excited me so much I had to tweet about it.

And even now I feel excited by this, and wonder if this kind of technology use could have a use for my students. Moving beyond a school shared drive, how would students feel if they can access any information via a variety of technologies? How would it change the way I teach and the way they learn? Will it enhance or depress adaptive abilities?

I don't know the answer to these questions but they excite me!