Do you ever find yourself just totally awed by the STUFF that is out there? I consider myself a person who embraces new technology, yet I sometimes still find myself agog. I just spent more than an hour Googling Earth. It’s not even like it’s my first time. Years ago I remember linking to a site that let you access satellite images of the Earth. But this is so much cooler than that. You start out with a little round globe on your computer and you can spin it and zoom in on any area of the world you want. I looked at my house, my sister’s house, my brother-in-law’s house, my old house, my even older house… Not everything came through perfectly clear, but the effect was impressive all the same. Click a little button and the highways and streets appear. Click another and you have major attractions, buildings, restaurants!
While I was doing that, my kids were writing and illustrating their own stories on a neat little program called “Storybook Weaver.” They were having a wonderful time trying to outdo one another’s adventures. Write the story. Select the pictures. Make the computer read the story back to you. It’s not rocket science, but it’s pretty darned neat.
Just today I have taken photos, put them on my computer, and digitally altered them. I have sent and received emails to/from friends from across the country. I have directly accessed my bank account online. I bought a pair of roller skates from a woman living in New Hampshire. I’ve rechecked my library books and requested a new book be sent to me.
Yesterday I shopped for houses in three different cities. I read newspapers from two different towns online. I can check the weather in any city in the world. The number of things I can do… just sitting here at my keyboard… these are things that not even a trip to the library would have entirely covered when I was a kid!
Anyway, I was just thinking about how my kids view the world compared to the view I had when I was a kid. The encyclopedia was my magic eye unto the world. Look what they have. They can, quite literally, take a peek at any place they can think of from the sky.
I mean… WOW!
I guess my dad’s generation told stories about walking to school, in the snow, uphill, both directions…
I’ll tell stories about walking to the library, sifting through the card catalog, looking up topics of interest in the reader’s guide to periodical literature, spending hours with my 20-year old atlas trying to imagine all the places I’d never been…
The world is a much smaller place than it used to be.
1 comment:
I hear the kids saying
"What's a card catalog?"
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