We are getting a new student teacher in the fall, and she spent a good chunk of Friday with our classes.  I have a great feeling about her joining our community.   Anyone who will say, “Have you asked someone else before asking me?” or broker a discussion about whether or not Gundam was too violent for an elementary school collection is off to a terrific start.  

Somehow — and I don’t remember how — in her Q&A with students, the question came up of where kids’ parents worked, and when we asked how many had parents at General Motors, six hands went up.

Tomorrow, says CNN, President Obama will announce GM’s bankruptcy.  I can only imagine the anxiety parents are trying to hide from their children … and that their children are feeling anyway.

The computer world is buzzing about Google’s demonstration of Wave.  What’s Wave? It’s hard to summarize in just one sentence.  You’d better watch the video of the official demo to find out for yourself.

It’s more than email, more than a collaborative conversation, more than a way to share photos into a single collaborative photo album.  You can have an email conversation that publishes to your blog and makes your blog and email a two-way conversation.  You can have email conversations that track over time, add participants as you go (and give them full access to past history), and have private chats within the conversation.  All within the same conversation - make a change anywhere, and the change is updated everywhere.  Move between mobile and desktop/laptop devices.

Collaboratively author documents and discuss them.  Show your conversations as you type to reduce waiting times.  Real-time updates on your collaborator’s screen as you do them on yours - no need to refresh screens. Spell check that sees words in context. Embed your social networks.  Play interactive games without leaving Wave.  Embed maps (and add icons/mark them up), videos, polls, forms, Twitter (including ongoing Twitter monitoring for topics that interest you), and gadgets.

And it’s all open source, so developers can build on the Google team’s ideas.

I’m sure that when the time comes, we’ll discover that the EULA gives Google the legal option to harvest what we do, but I’m amazed at the ease with which I say, “Oh, we’ll deal with that later” as the video unfolds.

This video of the demo at Google IO is blowing me away.  This is more than Web 2.0.  I have a feeling that Wave is going to change everything.  If only I could get a beta account … though I signed up to find out when it was available here (where, in addition to requesting notification when Wave is ready, you can leave a little poem or piece of art for the Wave developers - oh, how I love when the left and right brain merge).

As we continue to think about 21st-century learning and the potential role of ubiquitous computing devices like netbooks and mobile devices, the New York Times is reporting that doctors are becoming concerned about the potential negative impact of texting, from lost sleep due to late night texts to anxiety to sore thumbs.  It’s one in many articles that are emerging lately that urge us to temper progressive educational pedagogy with thoughtful reflection.