I just came back from my annual leave so I'm back blogging :-)! Anyways, today's post is rather a self reflection entry on my trip to Nepal and how not having always access to the internet made me think about how much access I do have when at home. Of course this is not a criticism of the availability of internet in Nepal as it is widely spread. I simply didn't always have it because I was travelling around the country! I was still moderating the CertICT by TheConsultants-e.com via my iPad and so this was not an easy task - doable but not easy-peasey!
One of the things I noticed and quickly had to adapt to was making sure I was writing entries, making comments and doing things in general more efficiently and faster than when I'm home so not a bad consequence of the limited access I had! In this respect I found my iPad app Posts(Version 1.1(24) was a great help as I could prepare the posts there and save them as drafts offline for latter posting. This was sometimes frustrating as even if entries had been prepared in Pages a slow connection meant I couldn't always publish my posts in the Moodle. I'm using MoodlEZ (paid for app for Moodle at USD2.99) and although it generally works well when at home, in Nepal it was hard to use because of how long it would take to have all the features active on the screen. Again, I believe this was really more due to the low speed of the connection than to the app.
I also realised that technology has permeated our lives in ways we could not have dreamed of a decade ago. I wonder how positive this is and whether we can actually make sure it is positive somehow! Along the same lines, it reminded me of how important it is to make informed decisions when planning IT integration into our lessons, training sessions and in general whenever we are in the classroom. I think that less is more as they say and in this light I'll keep an even more critical eye on how I use IT to ensure it is more quality IT than quantity IT. Would you agree?
Robert
