Life really changed for me in the last decade and a lot of it was thanks to technology. 10 years ago I had made the decision to do the big O.E to the UK. To keep things brief I was very fortunate to land a job teaching Chemistry at
Highgate School. I still remember the overwhelming gratefulness when they told me that they would supply me with my very own laptop, that I would be allowed to take it home with me each night (TELA laptop scheme did not exist back then). So there my love affair with technology started. Oh and did I mention I had a
SMART board too? this was in 2001 so I really did think I was in heaven.
Now I'm an ICT teacher (with emphasis on programming), big Moodle fan, I keep in touch with a valuable PLN via twitter, share my day-to-day comments with friends and family on Facebook, display photos and pictures of all sorts of things on Flickr, ramble on blogger, keep track of valuable urls on del.ici.ous, collaborate via Google doc's and I'm still trying to work out GoogleWave and that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my online presence.
10 years on and I'm very conscious about the "security" of having such an online presence. You really need to keep on your toes with some of the social networking sites and their evolving changes. To quote mashable, "Lately it seems like
Facebook changes its privacy options more often than most people change their statuses" and I would reccomend people read this link about
HOW TO: Use Facebook Privacy Controls on Your Fan Page.
If you have not gone and tweeked your privacy settings I strongly urge you to consider what the world (particularly your future employer, or for that matter your students) can find out about you and whether you want them to have this informaton. Facebook gave the world open access to your "Wall" and if you don't want Tom, Dick and Harry reading what you did last summer then you need to go and click some boxes to limit that access.
While I'm handing out links about Facebook the other one I would suggest worth reading is this one titled
Facebook: 5 predictions for 2010.
I have been looking at my options lately with regards to Virtualization/running a PC operating system on my MacBook. Last year I trialled Bootcamp but found that the PC software I wanted to run just didn't work properly. So I started looking into other options. While running a holiday programme for kids I trialled VMware fusion, the week I used it I found it did what I wanted and requested that we trial it in our computer labs but our techie was not keen. So I kept my eye open for other options. I then came across Parallels, Andy Feild was the one who mentioned it and I downloaded a trial but just before I bit the bullet and bought the software Miguel Guhlin mentioned in a New Years Day tweet VirtualBox. Here is a link to a beginners guide.
