When Tierney Cahill began teaching in the early 1990s, everything was on paper – textbooks, handouts, dittos – and the concept of owning a cell phone would have seemed bizarre.

When she arrived at Orlando International Airport on Monday, Jan. 23, a driver waited for Cahill not with her name scrawled in pen on a piece of paper, but written in digital ink on a tablet computer.

“As teachers, we’re in a very unique, exciting time,” Cahill announced as she delivered the opening keynote address at FETC 2012 (formerly the Florida Edcation Technology Conference but now simply FETC) on Tuesday, Jan. 24.

From those early pencil-and-paper days of her teaching career to now, Cahill, a teacher from Nevada whose student-led campaign for Congress in 2000 is the focus of an upcoming Hollywood film, pointed out that a lot has happened in education technology.

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In 1997, Google was registered as a domain; in 2002, Friendster, the first online social network, went live; the concept of Web 2.0 sprouted in 2004; Twitter opened its digital doors in 2006; in 2007 Google surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable worldwide brand; and last year, in 2011, protesters destabilized authoritarian regimes around the world using mobile technologies to post to Twitter and Facebook.

That worldwide wave of technology has begun to redefine teaching and learning to varying degrees as well, and FETC 2012 showcased the latest products and trends in education technology.

“I think the theme here is digital integration, iPad integration, cloud-based computing, Google-app stuff, everything in the clouds—making that transfer from paper to digital,” said Patti Palancia, an education consultant for A/V integration leader AVI-SPL.

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