One cool technology with lots of educational possibilities is Adobe InDesign. This program allows you to make sweet posters, pamphlets, books, cards, ANYTHING! It's very powerful. I'd consider teaching it to you but I think we have only one copy in the McKay lab :-(.
So instead, if you want to learn it, you'll have to teach yourself. Here's a great way to do this! Go to this link:
http://weblog.edupodder.com/2004/11/i-podcast-class.html
And download the powerpoint and the audiofile. You can listen to the audio while you flip through the powerpoint (another cool way to use podcasting technology, by the way).
Wait! I can hear the pessimism already! "But Rick, InDesign is expensive and we won't have it in our school." Well, you're right, you probably won't have it in your school, except maybe just one or two copies. But you will probably have similar programs, like Microsoft Publisher, which does pretty much the same thing but not as well as InDesign. That's the trick with technologies, they really make up a bunch of "classes." You have the "desktop publishing class" and the "photo manipulation class" (like Photoshop), the "drawing tool" class (like Illustrator), the "spreadsheet class" (like Excel) and the "presentation class" like PowerPoint, and lots of others. Once you learn one tool, you can pretty much use any of the tools in its class because they work the same way. So, no, you might not have InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator at your school, but learning these tools will definitely help you take advantage of the programs that you WILL have.
