By Ifanyi Bell
Educators are an industrious bunch. On a day-to-day basis, they have to make something out of nothing, and that's especially true when it comes to integrating technology in the classroom.
They're faced with a slew of barriers preventing a full-scale upgrade of technology—namely funding and an ideological consensus regarding reform, among other challenges. Until those things are sorted, educators will continue to use the vast patchwork of software and hardware available to them from the highly competitive consumer technology market.
Unfortunately, there's no centralized system -- the patchwork is just that: a hodgepodge of technology available to some, but not all. Software will run on this computer, but not that one. This license can be applied to that desktop, but not that laptop. This app can be loaded on an Apple, but not a PC.
There may be some good news -- at least in the media-making realm: Project Rome for Education, from Adobe, a suite of media making tools for classroom use, based on the design industry standard, Adobe Creative Suite (CS). Adobe has taken elements of its famous(ly expensive) media creation software (Photoshop, Illustrator, After-Effects, Premiere, etc.) and bundled it into an all-in-one kit for creating slideshows, digital stories, web-pages, presentations, and more.