Technology Autobiography

My name is Kyle, but you can call me Kyle.
I'm a Secondary English Grad Student, studying to be a High School English teacher.
I've lived a heavily technological life for the last nine years of my life as I've been working in the IT field. In my previous work, I did everything from server maintenance to training on smart phones. I've had a smart phone of some type for the past seven years and don't know how I'd live without it! This drives my wife crazy, but having access to Google maps, Facebook, Wikipedia, email and the rest of the internet in the palm of my hand has been helpful on many occasions. I've used both a mac and PC and am fluent in both, but I prefer the PC. Mac's have become extremely popular over the past few years, but it's honestly hard to come up with a business reason to spend 2 to 3x more money on one. PCs are cheaper, and easier to fix when they break which when it comes to computers, happens no matter what platform you choose. My family and I have also been using lots of technology around the house. We've been using a DVR in the house for a few years now and it's completely changed the way we watch television. We almost never see commercials and when we DO, our kids get confused! :) I'm definitely cool with that. We also connect to Netflix through our Blu-Ray player which is fantastic for our two kids. Whether watching Dora the Explorer or Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, there's always something available for the kids to watch. Just recently I bought a Kindle Fire and am trying to find a way to fit it into our lives. It's fantastic for reading, watching movies, and playing games, but it's hard to find where it fills a need that isn't already filled by something else.

Most of the technology that we use either gives us access to research utilities (laptop, iPhone, Kindle) or to entertainment (laptop, iPhone, DVR, Netflix, Kindle). The amazing thing is how blurry the line is getting between entertainment devices and research devices. a Kindle which originally was made for reading, now gives me access to the internet, email, netflix and games. My iPhone, which was of course originally just a phone, now does everything my laptop or Kindle does, but it fits in my pocket.

I'd say the 4 most significant technologies in my life would have to be my iPhone, laptop, DVR and Netflix. My iPhone, as I said before, is my constant link to the internet and all the information available there. My laptop gives me that access, but has a keyboard big enough to write blog posts and papers, as well as gets me connected to the games I like to play which require a bigger screen, and a lot more processing power. My DVR, as I said previously, has changed the way I watch TV. I don't watch commercials and I pick only the shows I want to watch. Netflix has changed children's television in my house. Shows that I wouldn't have access to because I don't have cable tv (like Dora) and not just the episode that the network decides should be on today but ALL the episodes from all (or most) of the previous seasons. Being able to pick for instance, from the last 8 seasons of Sesame Street, is fantastic.

I'm a techie kind of guy. That's the way I live, think and work, and I'm certain that my classroom will be heavily reliant on technology once I become a teacher. The generations that I'll be teaching will not have known a world without youtube or facebook, and I feel it's my duty to communicate with them in ways that they'll best understand.