Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Renewed Glass Attitude

I'm in my third week of experimenting with Google Glass.  One for sure observation I have is that Glass gets addicting.  A little over a week ago I was at a track meet trying to utilize Glass in some inventive way.  The battery on that device and also my phone (the network Glass was using) were just about dead and I gave serious consideration to giving up on it and handing it back to it's rightful owner.  I slept on it and, sorry Dave, decided to give it another positive, refocused week.  Since then I have just tried to keep Glass on my head more often than not and have found some neat, albeit not overly creative ways to use the technology.

One big factor in my renewed excitement toward Glass is the amount of people out there that are in the same experimental situation I'm in.  I joined a Google + Community - Google Glass in Education.  I posted a simple statement describing my situation and asking for suggestions on how to use Glass in the Tech Ed classroom.  Within hours I received feedback from several different community members, both offering suggestions and asking about my experience.  I then took it a step further and sent an email to the Wisconsin Tech Ed listserve, hoping to get some feedback or interest in Glass from people in my content area.  Again within hours I heard back from several people interested in my Glass experience or providing ideas.  It was encouraging to have people reach out and it really made me more excited to be a contributing part of this new technology, so thank you all.

So back to using Glass, I've continued to play around with different features of Glass.  I still feel like anything I can do with Glass I can do easier with my smart phone or iPad, but I'm determined to at least balance the scales.  I drove to my brother's new house, to which I haven't been to before.  I decided to utilize the turn-by-turn directions feature.  It was actually pretty great.  I was utilizing the sunglasses with Glass and when needed the screen lit up with a map and the lovely voice told me where to go.  I use the turn-by-turn feature on my phone occasionally but liked the convenience with Glass of just having it pop up just above my sight line.  I used Glass at another track meet last night and am starting to like the ease of the camera and video features. At first I found it cumbersome but after getting used to voice and touch commands taking pics and video is pretty nice (click for another example).  I still don't like how I can post a video I take on Glass to You Tube  but not directly to Twitter, but as long as my phone is charged it isn't too big of an inconvenience.  Tonight I went for a run (not a common occurrence) and utilized the Strava Run app.  It tracked my mileage, elapsed time, and mile rate.  It was going great until that lovely voice reappeared and told me my half-mile time was five minutes.  I hope none of my track athletes read this!  Actually it was great, except that info only stayed up for 5 seconds or so, so I kept having to tilt my head up to see my stats.  I need to fix that for the next run...

Through this whole experience I've thought a lot about what to write about in these posts.  (I realize that some of you are laughing right now, saying "and this is the best you came up with?")  I sit down to type and try to recall all the Glass experiences and thoughts since the last post and it hit me a few days ago.  I wish there were a Glass App for taking notes.  Or, better put, I wish I'd have thought of this earlier in my Glass experience and started using a note-taking app that I'm sure exists already.  Well, I checked and Evernote has an app for Glass and I just activated it.  I'm a huge note taker, as my phone and iPad can both prove, so I'm excited to use this over the next couple days.  My time using Glass is almost over, but I'm optimistic that between the next couple of days and hopefully, if Dave allows it, periodically when I'm convinced I have a great Glass idea, I can continue to use it.  I'll post some final thoughts in a few days.

1 comment:

  1. Not a problem, Josh. If you're just getting rolling with it and want it for another week, just let me know. I also think that some of the best observations are what you said in your post about needing to sit down and think about what you're using it for. In the spirit of "life uninterrupted" with Glass it shouldn't be something you have to always think about but rather lets you function without thinking about the teck.

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