Michael Mayrath's Educational Technology Blog

This blog includes perspectives and resources for educational technology. We view ed tech to be a very general term, but one way of looking at it is as a continuum ranging from the integration of technology into K-12 classrooms to intelligent virtual environments. According to our research, Texas K-12 classrooms still have on average only 2-3 student computers in each classrooms. While mobile laptop carts are becoming more common, over half the schools in Texas do not have laptop carts that can be wheeled into a classroom. Thus, across Texas public schools remains a shortage of computers and a lack of teacher professional development and integration technology mentorship. The computers that are available are usually 2-4 years old which limits their ability to run software that requires more powerful technology, such as Second Life.

On the other side of the educational technology continuum are the innovative and exciting applications possible with powerful computers. Such applications include animated pedagogical agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and virtual worlds. We are researching how these three technologies can be integrated to create the possibility of Intelligent Virtual Worlds, a likely topic for my dissertation.