Technology Taught People About The Blizzard of 2010

People in Washington DC did not see so much snow since 110 years ago. I never saw so much snow in my life. The city was paralyzed for almost a week. Nobody went to work or to school. Everything was closed. Everybody had to stay at home for many days. The streets were covered with snow and the snow was so high that people had to find ways to jump over the sidewalk to be able to cross the street. In addition, most of the cars were totally covered with snow.

When I looked at the cars, they looked like they were scoops of snow or tiny mountains of snow. Sometimes, you could not tell if there was a car or a mountain of snow.I took pictures of cars that looks like scoops of snow. I also took pictures from some streets and roads in Washington DC. It was almost impossible to drive and even to walk. Some people were skiing on the streets instead of walking.

When there is nothing to do and you are a college student that is stuck at home. What do you do? Exactly, you log into facebook and try to upload pictures to show your friends photos of the snow. I tried to upload some pictures, but was almost impossible. I think the reason was because Facebook was saturated by people trying to upload their photos. It took me hours to upload some pictures. In the blizzard facebook became a learning tool. People could see pictures of the blizzard everywhere in the USA and learn how to stay safe.

You could see what happened in the house of all your friends. You could read their status and know what they were thinking. For example, if you neighbors had an emergency or a problem you could try to help them. Also, you could communicate with other students to talk about homework and even study a little online.

Twitter became another important learning tool in the blizzard. CNN was twitting, NPR was twitting, people were following the weather in twitter and many people were twitting all the time. You could read the latest news about the weather, see pictures of the blizzard, sports and everything that was happening everywhere. I think that twitter taught many people about the blizzard, how to be safe, and where to find help. People were learning information about the blizzard by reading tweets in their cell phones or laptops.

In the other hand, the TV news was showing pictures of the blizzard that people uploaded in the news webpage. People were having fun taking pictures of the snow, sharing them with the TV and learning from the experience at the same time. It is important to mention that the TV, radio and Universities were using the internet to educate students about the blizzard and how to be safe. For example, University of Maryland was sending text messages or emails to students that registered to receive text or email alerts. Every day the students received alerts that told them that the university will be closed the following day. In addition, the UMD webpage had information about all the activities that were cancelled because of the blizzard.

Today everybody is using different kinds of technology to learn about disasters like earthquakes or blizzards. People are blogging about all kind of disasters. In fact, blogging has become another technological learning tool. Some universities like University of Maryland created a course that teaches students how to learn information by creating blogs. This is a nice way to make students learn more about their carriers or topics that they like. For example, Information 3.0: Exploring Effects of Our Technological Tools is a course that teaches students how to create blogs and use the technology to learn how to become good bloggers and journalists. This class lets the students to think out of the box because they can chose their own topic about technology and write a lot about it. I think that to write about something you like is the best way to learn.

In the next post I will explain how technology was used to educate scientists and helped them to discover the structure of DNA in the twenty century. This was an example of how technology helped scientists to find new information and learn from it. The discovery of the structure of DNA was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twenty century. It is important to mention that to find the structure of DNA scientists had to learn many things from technology that they didn’t know. If technology did not show them how the real structure looked like, they will never be able to figure it out.