The Connection Between Technology And Childhood Obesity

Today, it is hard to imagine life without a computer or television and other electronic gadgets that have become so commonplace since the advent of modern technology that it is leaving us and our children with little time to enjoy nature and the outdoors. Not so long ago, parents derived much pleasure from seeing their kids cavorting in the outdoors beneath the sun or climbing trees and remaining somewhat more active than the kids of today who have found a virtual world in which to remain engrossed. Thus, technology and childhood obesity are closely related because we have now become accustomed to having our eyes glued to the computer screen or television screen and are otherwise taken up with different forms of electronic entertainment.

Boob-Tube And More Boob-Tube

The new lifestyle that has taken over our children’s lives leaves little time for them to exercise, go out and remain otherwise active and it is far removed from the lifestyle our parents enjoyed many years ago. Along with the sedentary life that our children have become accustomed to, technology and childhood obesity have become closely intertwined and our concern for our health has also taken a backseat as the life in front of the boob-tube continues to take up all of our children’s time at the expense of their health.

It is thus imperative to understand the reason why technology and childhood obesity are going hand in hand, and when one considers the fact that child obesity has gone up by more than three times in the recent past, the problem has actually now reached epidemic proportions and it seems that now we are breeding obesity in our homes as we are letting our children spend all of their time in front of the television or other electronic devices.

The fact is that when we and our children sit immobile for hours on end watching television or working on the computer or playing video games, we neglect to exercise and along with a diet consisting of sodas and fast foods are breeding obesity like never before. Thus, technology and childhood obesity are causing our children to eat more, exercise less and live sedentary lifestyles which is a cocktail that only serves up more obese children in our population today.

No doubt, there are a number of other factors too that contribute to obesity, but television is a prime example of how technology and childhood obesity combine to the detriment of our health. Staying glued to the television will mean a lack of exercise, focusing on excessive eating followed by an unhealthy lifestyle and thus contributing to furthering the incidence of obesity in our children.

Television and the computer are prime examples of how technology and childhood obesity are making kids do things that are bad for them and if you want your kid to not become obese, you should discourage him from watching too much television, which is a major reason why children become obese, and to also address obesity as a health problem which needs to be addressed and not to consider obesity as merely being a problem with how the child looks.

6 Ways You Can Grow Your Creativity Using Technology

Ever pondered on whether you can grow your creativity using Technology? Can you relate? Read on to find out.

Here are a few eye-provoking ways:

1) Music Composition

Do you have a yearning for music? You can download tabs, lyrics and compose music with voice using suitable software and play it in a concert while you go live as well. It will help you keep in track and any mistakes can be covered up. That way you are bound to be a success. People will love your show and you will be in demand.

2) Online Art Exhibition

Everything can be digitized now. Get those paint, water colors and drawing board and create some beautiful art. With Adobe Photoshop you can give further shades and change colors according to your taste and give a finishing touch to the art. Then sell it in an online art exhibition.

3) Creative Writing

Anyone can start writing creatively provided they read and write enough. Plot a story – take one or two days and then start writing. Everything will work out fine so long you plan everything about when you are going to finish your great piece of work, when you are going to sell and publicize it. Don’t give up – keep hanging on. As for the selling part and publicizing, Amazon would be a great place.

4) Photography

Photography is a great creative hobby for anyone. You learn to take photographs in enough light or with your camera’s flash light at night. Once you have the photographs computerized, you can further refine face shapes and colors, body shapes and colors and background colors using Adobe Photoshop. And finally print them out if you like.

5) Making handicrafts

Handicrafts can be made out of wood, bamboo, jute and cotton. They can be of various types depending on your taste for instance, smaller versions of real life objects such as, toy dolls, toy rickshaws and others such as, a handbag, money wallet, a picture with a village scene, boutique T-shirts etc. You can sell these in an appropriate online shop.

6) Making Blended Tea

Get different blends of tea leaves and try one day two blends, another day another two different blends and the third day three blends. And actually boil them in a tea pan. After boiling is done and tea leaves are removed, add sufficient milk and sugar and find out which day’s blended tea you liked the best. Have that more often and feel great. You can make a video of blended tea made by you creatively and embed it in YouTube.

You can tap your creative side in the above ways and technology can help you to grow in ways I have mentioned. Without technology in this modern day, life is meaningless. It has reached every sector of the world. So you need to keep yourself updated in your niche as well as the technology niche.

With both combined and the power of the two, money will keep rolling in. First attempt tried and tested methods of the combination and then when you have sufficient income, you can go experimenting by trial and error. Do not take too many risks or too little either. Do it slow. Take my word for granted – you will soar.

Wearable Technology

At this year’s event a considerable number of stands were focused on smart watches. A decade ago the idea that a watch could do anything more than keep time would have seemed like science fiction, but advances in technology have opened up a whole new world of possibility.

Sports Watches

Some of the smart watches operate like personal trainers. They sit on your wrist whilst you take part in your sport or activity of choice and provide a wealth of data from your route and distance covered to your heart rate and calories burned. The show included the HTC Grip and the Leap+, both of which include GPS and sports tracking functionality.

Business Watches

The LG Watch Urbane, Pebble Time and Huawei watches are some of the watches on offer that put smart technology on your wrist. With WiFi access, GPS and voice activation technology, they have the potential to transform connectivity over the coming years. These watches can connect with phones, tablets and possibly other technology in order to provide a convenient way to access apps, check emails, take pictures and navigate to a destination.

The Future of Wearable Technology

Although the first smart watches were launched in 2013, it is early days for this technology, yet we are already seeing great developments to make them increasingly practical and useful. There is already research into how wearable technology could play a crucial role in the delivery of personalised healthcare, such as reminding elderly patients when they are due to take medication, to monitoring the blood sugar levels of diabetes patients. As developments continue the possibilities will evolve in many more directions.

Whilst at present it is likely to be early adopters and gadget fans who buy the smart watches that hit the market this year, we could all be ordering one in a few years, when advances have made the technology more valuable and affordable.

Is Wearable Technology Important to your Business?

Whether we are ready to embrace this technology or not, the important factor is that we accept that mobile technology is going to play an increasing role in communication. As business owners, we may not choose to buy wearable technology ourselves, but we have to be open to the idea that our customers might be adapting their habits with the availability of mobile technology.

If we want to communicate with our customers, we need to adapt our methods of communication to best suit those customers.

The rate of change is fast, but rather than thinking we need to keep pace with the latest technology, what we should be aiming for is to meet the changing needs of our customers. If your business website has yet to be converted to a mobile responsive site, how are you providing a good online service?

Mobile responsive website designs are a necessity, not an option. Take action now and be prepared that it may need revisiting in another year or two in order to deliver what your customers are looking for.

Evolving Website Design

Looking back a decade or two, a website design was a relatively static online marketing tool, but things have changed. You may have spent months planning and preparing the content on your current site, expecting it to last for many years, but now it is important to regularly add fresh content to your website pages.

The cost of a website design has dropped considerably in this time too, so it’s affordable to embrace change. You website pages need to be updated regularly and its design and functionality should be reviewed every year. A static website offers little value to your loyal customers and will struggle to attract new ones. However, an evolving website design, with fresh, relevant and valuable content being regularly added will help you to meet your customer’s needs and allow your website to gain and retain a good position in the search engine listings.

Urban Media http://urbanmedia.co.uk/web-design-uk/ has been building business websites since 1997. We’ve had to adapt to changes in online marketing and technology to ensure we deliver a great website design service to our customers. By keeping pace with technology, we can help you to deliver a great service to yours.

How Technology Has Made Our Lives Easier

Technology Importance:

Technology has made immense advancements over the years. It has helped us in many ways. In our daily lives there is not a single thing that does not involve the use of technology. It is just impossible to avoid the impact of technology, whether it is positive or negative. Technology has proven that we cannot ignore the ease it brings to our lives. Without technology our lives would be really difficult. We have become so accustomed to using technological advancements that at times we don’t even realize how dependent we are.

Education:

The advancements in technology have helped us in every field of life especially science. It has also helped students in a lot of ways. The internet has tons of information about everything. Service projects are available on the internet to help students in their coursework. Online learning programs and online libraries are the main sources that catch a student’s attention. Almost all the universities around the world are running online degree programmes for their off-campus students. Students, teachers and researchers have access to all sorts of data to analyse, interpret and utilize it.

Health

Medical science has found cure for almost all those diseases that were incurable a few decades ago. Numerous lives have been saved since the discovery of antibiotics and other medicines. The miracles medical science has achieved range from vaccines to stem cell production. The list is ongoing and we cannot be thankful enough to the medical science for immense ease it has brought in our lives by saving us from countless maladies spread around us.

Entertainment

Technology provides us with plenty of ways to occupy our time. Kids and teens especially are into the trend of playing games on computers, laptops or even smart phones. Radio was the first invention that aired various programmes for listeners ranging from music, news, plays etc. This led on to invention of TV which still remains as one of the popular ways of spending your time. It not only entertains us but also provides us with the latest news. The variety of programmes on different TV channels is more than enough to keep people occupied.

In the past people used to have cassette tapes or CDs in order to listen to music. Today’s portable music players have made it easier for people to listen to music. The sources of entertainment through electronic and print media are endless. Print media has become more advanced and printing of books and other informational material has become easier, faster and cheaper.

Communication

In our daily lives people hardly find time to talk with their loved ones in person. Technology has solved this issue by connecting people with their relatives and loved ones across the globe. We can share our daily activities with our friends by using social media. Texting, e-mailing and calling have revolutionized the way we communicate. There are countless apps that are used by innumerable people to stay in touch with their friends and family.

The access to information and knowledge has become easier and faster with numerous scientific inventions. The whole world seems to have shrunken and more open with all these developments. Although there are two sides of this coin like always, but there is no denial to the fact that the world has changed in almost all aspects because of technology.

How Is Technology Affecting Your Sleep?

Research indicates that adults require 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night to function properly. However, not many can say that they’ve had a restful night, and studies prove that technology is one of the many factors to blame. While our smartphones and tablets make life easier in many ways, they might also be responsible for all those times we wake up feeling grumpy and sleep deprived. It might not be difficult to recover from this initial grogginess, but prolonged sleep deprivation is known to cause reduced cognitive functioning, mood swings and chronic health problems like high blood pressure and heart disease.

If you find yourself longing for a good night’s sleep, understanding how technology affects your sleep patterns can help you to take small steps to start sleeping better.

It Affects your Body Clock

Everybody has a body clock that regulates their sleeping schedule – it tells us when to sleep and wake up. This clock is controlled by the hormone ‘melatonin’. Research has found that blue light emitted from digital screens (our laptops or smartphones) suppresses melatonin, interfering with our body clocks. This disruption causes irregularities in our sleep cycles that have an effect on our mood – making us feel tired, irritable and prone to experiencing anger and hostility. Additionally, there’s also research to show that constant fatigue is responsible for poor decision making in logical, rule-based tasks.

Sleep Better: Start by creating a sleep-friendly zone in your bedroom. Do this by establishing one simple ground rule-no electronics in the bedroom. Yes, this includes your laptop and television! If keeping your electronics outside the bedroom seems too difficult a task, follow the rule of ‘no electronics use in the bedroom’ post a certain time in the night (preferably 30 to 60 minutes prior to bedtime). This in turn will allow you to fall asleep quickly.

It’s Keeping You Awake

There’s nothing more frustrating than finally falling asleep but hearing the buzz of incoming notifications from your phone. To avoid the negative effects associated with sleep deprivation, it’s important to get a full night’s rest rather than fragmented periods of sleep. This fragmentation interrupts memory processes and research indicates that it affects our performance on tasks related to attention and memory.

Sleep Better: Switching off your phone and any device that might wake you up in the middle of the night would be ideal, however if that sounds too extreme, put your phone on the silent, and/or no vibrate mode.

It Enables Sleep Procrastination

Ever told yourself that you are so exhausted that you must sleep by 11:00 pm, but then you find yourself watching a YouTube video or texting a friend at 12:30 am? It happens with all of us. The use of technology often leads to sleep procrastination, which involves going to bed later than intended, even though there are no legitimate external circumstances accountable for doing so.

Sleep Better: Start by identifying the cause of your procrastination. If the cause is binge watching a television show, try turning off the television and your laptop half an hour before your bedtime and use that half hour to get your body to power down. You can do this by having a glass of milk, changing into pyjamas or reading.

Use it Wisely to Sleep Better

With the right kind of technology, you can actually regulate your sleep cycle. A number of fitness trackers are widely available today and can be worn around the wrist to track your sleep. Such trackers provide data about the number of hours of sleep as well as the quality of sleep. As a result, they allow you to set sleep goals and calculate your progress towards achieving these goals.

Teaching With Technology

Teaching with technology helps to expand student learning by assistant instructional objectives. However, it can be thought-provoking to select the best technology tools while not losing sight of the goal for student learning. An expert can find creative and constructive ways to integrate technology into our class.

What do we mean by technology?

The term technology refers to the development of the techniques and tools we use to solve problems or achieve goals. Technology can encompass all kinds of tools from low-tech pencils, paper, a chalkboard to the use of presentation software, or high-tech tablets, online collaboration and conference tools and more. the newest technologies allow us to try things in physical and virtual classrooms that were not possible before.

How can technology help students?

Technology can help a student through the following ways:

1. Online collaboration tools: Technology has helped the students & instructors to share document online, editing of the document in real time and project them on a screen. This gives the students a collaborative platform in which to brainstorm ideas and document their work using text and pictures.

2. Presentation software: This enables the instructor to embed high-resolution photographs, diagrams, videos and sound files to augment the text and verbal lecture content.

3. Tablet: Here, tablets can be linked to computers, projectors, and cloud so that students and instructors can communicate through text, drawings, and diagrams.

4. Course management tools: This allows instructors to organize all the resources students’ needs for the class. the syllabus, assignments, readings, online quizzes.

5. Smartphone: These are a quick and easy way to survey students during class. It is a great instant polling which can quickly access students understanding and help instructors to adjust pace and content

6. Lecture capture tools: The lecture capture tools allow instructors to record lectures directly from their computer without elaborate or additional classroom equipment. The record lectures at their own pace.

Advantages of technology integration in the education sphere?

The teaching strategies based on educational technology can be described as ethical that facilitates the students learning and boost their capacity, productivity, and performance. technology integration inspires positive changes in teaching methods on an international level. The following list of benefit will help in resolving a final conclusion:

1. Technology makes teaching easy: technology has power. It helps in the use of projectors and computer presentations to deliver any type of lesson or instruction and improve the level of comprehension within the class rather than giving theoretical explanations that students cannot understand.

2. It facilitates student progress: technology has made teachers rely on platforms and tools that enable you to keep track of individual achievements.

3. Education technology is good for the environment: if all schools have dedicated to being using digital textbooks, can you imagine the amount of paper and number of trees that will be saved. students can be instructed to take an online test and submit their papers and homework through email. They can be also encouraged to use readers to read through the literature assigned.

4. It has made students enjoy learning: students enjoy learning through their addiction to Facebook, Instagram, dig, and other websites from a very early age. the internet can distract them from the learning process. making learning enjoyable through setting up a private Facebook group for the class and inspire constructive conversations.

5. It makes distance learning more accessible: without the internet, people won’t be able to access any vital information. today distance learning is one of the most trending learning methods. Students can organize their time in a way that works for them and they can easily gain the knowledge they are interested in.

The Effect of Digital Technology in the Music Industry

Nowadays, teenagers are living constantly surrounded by technology even if the younger generation may not see it, technology has had an impact on the world as a whole. The widespread use of digital technology in the music industry has allowed consumers to reproduce digital versions of copyrighted song inexpensively with the help of many software and websites.

The growth of downloads and exchange of music are held responsible for the decrease of music sales since the end of the 90s. Information and communication technologies, and especially the internet, changed the logic of consumption and the process of producing music.

One of the biggest challenges for the music industry was to deal with the invention of the MP3 file. This file came into life between 1996 and 1999 and since then, piracy became more and more important. The MP3 file enables people to save files on computers and share music with anyone in the world.

Asides this, YouTube which is the third most visited website in the world behind Google and Facebook houses 100 hours of video every minute. One of the major fact to keep in mind is that YouTube is paying artists and music labels. We also have other channels like Vevo.

On April 28, 2003, Apple released the iTunes store. The iTunes store which has more than 500 million users in 119 countries has more than 25 billion songs. Nowadays, artists make most of their money by touring and selling music on iTunes.

Even though digital technology have had bad effects on the music industry, new devices appeared and helped the music industry. These days, the industry is stimulated, thanks to the competition created by Spotify or even SoundCloud which enables to display music and protect copyrights for free or at a very low price.

Entertainment has been a popular tool for over a decade ago with popular musicians at the centre stage with names like 50 Cent born ‘Curtis James Jackson, The Notorious B. I. G born Christopher George Latore Wallace, D. M. C born Darryl Mc Daniels, 2Pac born Tupac Shakur, LL Cool J born James Todd Smith and a host of other prominent foreign musicians who have really proved to the world at large what music entails.

They inspire young and upcoming artists on the rudiment of music and on the need to see music as not just a career but as something to relieve the body from stress and to liven the soul. The entertainment industry the captured the mind of the populace by promoting arts and culture and then lifestyle.

Celine Dion

Prominent among whom is Celine Dion, a Canadian Singer who was born on 30th March 1968 into a large family from Charlemagne, Quebec. She first gained international recognition in the 1980s by winning both the 1982 Yamaha world popular song festival and the 1988 Eurovision song contest where she represented Switzerland. She released several English albums along with additional French albums.

Micheal Jackson

Also, we have the American singer Micheal Joseph Jackson, a song writer, dancer, who was one of the most popular entertainers in the world and was the best selling music artist during the year of his death. He was born in August 29, 1958.

Nowadays with the influx of several artists and with modernization, entertainment have taken a new dimension with more of the cinema, open shows, mall entertainment, amusement parks where notable musicians thrills large audience to delectable fun. It has become more of competition these days with all artists trying to live up to expectation in order to capture large audience compared to that of the olden days where competition is at its lowest as artists inspires and instills more of moral in the mind of the audience

In conclusion, the digital technology has impacted greatly on the music industry and given the enormous contribution to the industry, we can deduce amidst its disadvantages that the digital technology has made music reachable to the people at the grassroots at little or no cost thus making them have access to music at any day and at any time.

Applying Technology in Hiring

Human contact, whether through professional networking, social connections, or by earned reputation still matters significantly and should in no way be minimized when describing the recruitment and hiring process. If anything, it’s paramount. However, another very important track to cover when developing one’s career is the one driven by existing and emerging technologies meant to streamline and optimize the employment process.

Today this ranges from online job boards advertising positions, to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that parse resumes for HR and recruiters, and now Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools, designed to assess the employability of candidates. How to advantageously position yourself for these digital aides and gatekeepers needs to be a key component of a well-planned career growth strategy. Let’s take a current look at each of these technical features.

Online job boards are not very new, in short supply, or complicated. They are little more than interactive web sites that post job descriptions from employers. More recent are job search engines like Indeed and Simply Hired that rummage the internet aggregating job postings from a variety of sources.

These sites are seductive in that they give the appearance of a job store with profuse amounts of positions just ready for you to pick up while shopping. A common and ineffective ploy is to spend hours responding to jobs on the boards with the only thing generated being recruiters trying to lure you to high turnover 100% commission sales jobs. Nonetheless, working with job boards is not a complete waste of time and decent jobs can be yielded. Recommended is to spend about 10% to 20% of your job search time utilizing the boards by being careful and discriminating in what you respond to.

ATS software allows recruiters to organize vast lists of applicants and their pertinent criteria such as qualifications, employment history, degrees earned, etc., which are most useful to hiring managers when determining who to contact for interviews. For those of us trying to secure an interview we need to be mindful of preparing resumes that are keyword-rich with contextually used terms aligning our skills and knowledge with responsibilities and deliverables mentioned in job descriptions.

Therefore, given the need for an ATS-friendly resume that simultaneously is attractive for human readers the challenge is to strike a visually appealing format that won’t confuse the ATS. This can be tricky. If you want a designer resume that looks like those on a photo collection website, then forget about passing ATS muster. And with so many companies employing ATS the best strategy may be to pay homage to the many conditions needed to not be digitally rejected in a millisecond, while adding enough optics, and of course solid content, to not have your resume look like just another slice of white bread. Achieving this level of resume optimization is a necessary goal.

The latest trend, which is expected to proliferate in use and sophistication, involves the impact of AI in hiring decision making. There is a growing perception that relying on a candidate’s skills alone is not consistently producing better employees. The evolving thought is to assess personality more with the goal of finding a well rounded and compatible colleague. To this end, AI is being deployed to identify personality traits gleaned from resumes, online profiles, social media presences, video appearances, you name it. Apparently, this is seen as less biased than human observers. We shall see. (Can’t algorithms be biased too?)

At any rate, developing a consistent brand and value proposition that includes both your technical talents and your work style/interpersonal characteristics across all platforms may be wise for presenting to human and technological appraisers alike.

Being prepared for the changes and encroachment of technology into hiring decisions, and by extension career development, has become an imperative in today’s employment world.

Improve Your Efficiency By Collaborating Technology With Business Operations

People now travel all over the world for personal and professional purposes. The business realm has experienced a huge change regarding meeting clients, business associates, bureaucrats etc. in the past decade. According to a research done by US Travel Association, direct spending on domestic and international business travels was close to $ 307.2 billion in the year 2016.

To create a brand name worldwide, one has to market its product on a global level. To do that, workshops, seminars, meetings are all normal and every bit of it requires a travel plan, however, more important than a fine strategy is the technology in any industry. One business can benefit tremendously if collaborating with the right technology in the right manner.

Major benefits of using technology for business transportation are:

Presence Of Mind:
One major benefit technology provides in the business realm is the presence of mind. People can completely focus on the current task without wondering what is scheduled for the next. The innovation of the Apple watch is one such great invention. Now people can keep a regular check of their mailbox, schedule, and messages whilst sitting in a meeting and not disturbing the energy of the room by checking everything over the mobile phone again and again.

Airport Journeys Become Easy:
People who are a frequent traveler will surely understand the pain of airport travels where you need to keep everything handy; from passport to boarding pass. Rather than fetching things every time in your hand band, you can easily store your flight ticket, boarding pass details in your watch and scan it as and when required at the airport security checkpoints. This surely will save you enough time which can be utilized for reading a great novel or creating a presentation in the waiting area.

Communication Luxury:
Mostly the traveler's hands are busy in carrying luggage. In such cases, attending chauffeurs calls and understanding where is your chauffeur located, is a bit difficult task. Again, the Apple watch is a life saver here. You can attend the calls and fetch your car by just clicking on the watch. This helps you to leave the airport in style without creating a mess with your luggage while finding your smartphone in the bag.

When technology combines with the business it makes life and tasks much simpler. The usage of these technologies differs from person to person but the benefits they provide are countless.

Assistive Technology Advancements Offer A New Wave of Possibility For Your Child With Special Needs

Technology has a way of skidding from science fictions 'past into the present like Michael J Foxs' Delorean in "Back to the Future". Remember those sliding doors in Star Trek on the USS Enterprise? We take them for granted now. And every time I see someone flip open a cell phone and talk to someone, I expect to hear them say "Beam me up Scotty." The day of live streamed video mail is coming soon -very soon. Every science fiction movie I ever saw had someone talking to someone else from a TV screen and we all laughed, yet today I heard that our IT department is supplying built in web-cams standard on all newly issued laptop models.

I had a real wide-eyed moment today and I have to share it with you. I watched our doctor wave a Dr. McCoy-Star Trek-type "tricorder" over my sons chest. "What IS that?" I had asked. The doctor explained that it would "re-align the electrical impulses that were out of sync so his respiratory infection could heal."

"Seriously?" I thought to myself. This was real. My son thought it tickled and the doctor did the treatment until the levels on the front showed the body had re-calibrated. Just when you think you are getting a handle on things, something new pops up and surprises you.

I am a specialist in assistive technology. I see new things that come out on the market all the time. I have been following the research and development of mapping the neuro-network of the brain to pinpoint the combinations of impulses and electrical frequencies that make up hand, wrist and arm movements. There are studies right now on how to re-create these impulses in "bionic" arms that replace severed ones. The research will allow our human brain to operate the new appendage by thought.

I was at a national convention this fall where I sat and had an eye gaze unit wirelessly track my retina from four feet away. As I looked around, the cursor on a large flat computer screen moved in the same direction. The cost was huge, but the technology was there for someone who is severely disabled and wants to access life through a computer. I'm sure I saw Tom Cruise do that in a movie a couple of years ago.

There is no way any one person can know it all about any niche in technology anymore. The world is becoming more and more specialized. We have specialized services within specialized niches that are in specialized markets of specialized companies. It can get pretty crazy. I have heard predictions that there will come a time when a person with my job in general assistive technology will not be able to be an assistive technology specialist anymore. They will have to focus on a sub-category because the specialization will be so intense.

How does this apply to parents of children with disabilities? If you are a parent, You need to know a couple of things:

1. You should be comfortable in knowing that you can't learn it all.

Don't put yourself through guilt and frustration over this fact. Just get an overview of the services and equipment your child may need. Be prepared to say "I don't know but I can find out." That is my biggest phrase. I have learned how to find a needle in a haystack on the Internet when it comes to AT. I spend a great deal of my time online researching equipment, treatment, therapy or definitions and descriptions of medical disorders. Be ready to see the Internet as your best friend. There is so much information out there it is staggering.

Most people hate to waste time searching for information. They want it done for them. If you have a child with a disability, start searching and asking. There are answers out there. I don't even pretend to think or want to bluff you into thinking that I know all there is. "All there is" changes every day. If I were to comment on occupational and physical therapy supports, new treatment for seizures and ADHD with neurofeedback for children using computer games and slot car race tracks, simulating virtual reality on the TV with a Wii, and so on, we would be here for the next 2 years – and by then 70% of what we knew would be obsolete and new technologies would have taken over.

2. There are new and limitless possibilities for young children with disabilities.

Where we are headed is going to be amazing. The textbooks need to be re-written on how we serve children because of the impact of technology in every aspect of education and special needs service delivery. If you are a parent of a small child today, the advances in technology to support are going to be incredible. It is a good time to be alive. You have options no one had before you. There is technology to support your child that is amazing. Take some time to look search blogs, forums and pod casts that talk about technology in education, assistive technology and trends in alternative medicine for neurofeedback. The technology associated with alternative medicine is gaining more respect as time goes on and shows great promise as it becomes a hybrid in collaboration with traditional medicine and treatment.

I imagine by the time you read this, I'll need to be writing a second edition. That's OK. As long as I don't expect to ever catch up, I can relax and find the things that work. That is what serving children with assistive technology is all about anyway. Finding out what works to support kids.

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