I had the opportunity to participate in a live video conference with the Royal Tyrell Museum today along with my tech class. The museum is physically located in Drumheller, Alberta, which is a few hours from where we were. While the distance may have not been extreme, the technology can theoretically be used from anywhere in the world, and that's what makes it neat.

To show us the idea of their video-conference program, a lady showed us various dino-images and bones, even walking in front of what I presume was a green screen as pictures of the actual museum came up behind her, on a sort of virtual tour. She seemed to be able to see our class surprisingly well, and the audio was better than expected. We even partook in some interactive games which required her to put up animations on the screen, which was of course possible since our conference was possible through the use of a computer.

All in all it was a very cool technology and I hope I can have a chance to use this kind of a lesson at some point with my class. I think it's really cool that the kids get the perspective of an "expert" in their field, which keeps their attention much better than the regular old teacher rambling about it. The way she brought the museum to us was also way cool. with close up cams showing dino-bones in detail. It was a great experien

Yeah, I said it! Google has an absolute monopoly on internet(s). Not technically, no, but when was the last time you used Bing or Yahoo? If the answer was in the past year, than check yourself before you wreck yourself. Just kidding, but honestly none of the other search engines can even close to compare to the resources found through Google. I even have my email address with Google's "Gmail" platform, and it is far superior to any other email service I have used. Simply put, Google can do pretty much anything. From a glimpse into your neighbors backyard with Google Maps, to viewing colleagues documents on Google Drive, the amount of information Google has access to is staggering. Thousands of academic papers and semi-private documents move through their servers on a daily basis. Stop and think for a moment just how much information we're talking here. I mean forget Google Drives for a second, Virtually all of the accessible/visible information on the internet is accessed by Google at some point. So next time you go to share something on Facebook, or Google+, or Twitter, or MySpace (Just kidding nobody uses that) think about who...and what might have access to that information.

BUT REALLY
The Moral is that nobody uses and/or cares about Bing, Yahoo, or any other crappy search engine anymore - Google is boss. Hail to the king baby!!

EDIT: This did not post for some reason, should have been up a long time ago!