2013-04-25 Technology!

Wow! I really have to apologize to our classmates who visit our blog frequently and care about what's new on here! I've been a bit lazy lately. Being a parent has let me confront more challenges than I thought but at the same time, it also provides me a chance to be immersed in joy, happiness and abundance.

It was exciting to see everyone again tonight and we welcomed 4 fantastic presentations from Julie, Lucas, Amar and Marian. Many thanks to them and we all got to learn more!

In the beginning of today's class, Abbie led us to read some poems about technology. All of them were special and the writers of those poems used different ways to describe how technology affects their lives and their perspectives on the things around them. We also got to read those beautiful poems together and dip deep into them to discover what those writers really wanted to say. Here's the link of those poems and if you are interested, go check it out. http://tweentribune.com/essaycontestwinners

Here's one of my favorite ones. I was thrilled by this poem and felt really blessed that I'm healthy in some way and get the chance to re-realize how important health is!

How does technology
make the world a better place?

Grade 9 First Place   Melodyy wrote: 

With waterfall tears, I've said my goodbyes
Awaiting my fate, in bedsheets I lie
Though hopeless it seems, I begin to dream
Of running through fields, dancing in streams
But before long, I'm taken away
Placed in a room, where I have to stay
There's blinding bright lights, machines everywhere
My heart starts pounding, and I become scared
My vision then blurs, my eyelids fall
I'm suddenly dreaming, escaping it all
Then I'm awoken, "Everything's okay"
"The tumor is gone," and I'm here to stay
I think of my life, possibilities too
Technology, I owe my life to you.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

After those thought-provoking poems, we jumped to our presentations. Julie gave us the first presentation. Before she started her topic, she shared some of the latest technology with us and I couldn't help thinking of what our world would be in the near future. Julie talked about a project called OLPC a.k.a One Laptop Per Child. It's a project supported by the Miami-based One Laptop Per Child Association(OLPCA) and the Cambridge-based OLPC Foundation. Its mission is to empower the world's poorest children through education. It provides each kid with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. They hope that those children can become more connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future! Sometimes, it's hard for us who live in Taiwan to know that still many people in the world don't have the access to computers or cellphones, and if we want, we can also give our hands to the organization through donations. Thanks, Julie!

The second presentation was about one of the newest printing technology - 3D printers. Lucas showed us how this new type of printer works to produce a 3-dimensional solid object rather than some printed piece of paper. He also displayed some pictures of different types of 3D printers and those different materials used by them. Although the prices of 3D printers remain much higher than the normal ones, we can expect the coming future that more and more people would adopt this new technology to give their friends more surprises in their own technical ways. 

Ammar then introduced this interesting topic about smart phones. Nowadays, a large number of people in Taiwan use smart phones to communicate with friends, visit the social network websites, read novels, play games, take pictures, and etc... According to his own experience of using different types of smart phones, he recommended us those smart phones with the Android operation system. It's easy to learn and use and it offers tons of free applications for us to choose from. He shared a useful program "The Voice Search of the Google Dictionary" provided by Google. You can just say the word to the receiver of your cell phone and the program will identify the word then translate it into the language you want. Moreover, Barrett even gave it a try to see how it worked, and it did WORK well to translate "I Love You" into "Wall Eye Knee" in Chinese pronunciation! 



The last but not the least, Marian brought us back into a different area of technology. She introduced the food revolution and inventions in our human history. 

There are two important technologies invented to improve the safety of food. One is Pasteurization in 1860 and the other is Refrigeration in 1877. Both of the technologies help us to be able to have clean and healthy food and also to prevent some diseases in some certain degree . Have you ever wondered our lives without those two epochal technologies? Or have you ever thought of our lives when we still had to use ice and closets to store our food? Then, Marian shared more information about the convenience created by those food inventions. Eggcartons, metal cans, can openers, knives, bread slicers, microwaves, chopsticks, mixers, blenders, tea bags, corks plastic wraps and etc... Almost all of these things are frequently used in our daily lives and we can see them everywhere. But what if we didn't have them in our lives? What would our lives be? Technology. It's a friend of ours that helps us save our time, energy and strength. However, it's also a friend that gradually takes something, some feeling and some skill out of us. Maybe it's our worst best friend, eh?