Google AdSense

You may notice that I have added Google AdSense to my blog sidebar. While I am normally averse to adding advertisements to a blog or personal website, I am curious to see what type of revenue could be gained through my current 2000 hits per month.

All money gained through adding the Google AdSense function will be dedicated to my classroom budget, with the principal goal of finding out whether or not I can get enough advertisement income to finance a wireless Internet account/router for the classroom. If I can accomplish this, I would be an interesting experiment in DIY tech support! If not, my hope is that there will be at least some contribution to our classroom resources.

I did a quick survey yesterday, and found out that we had a potential total of over 250 gigabytes (250,000,000,000 bytes) of computing power between the 14 students in the classroom. This includes iPods, DS's and other personal devices as well as my own computing tools. This is a staggering capacity, most of which has Internet access. To put his in perspective:

• The first personal computer had a 256-byte memory
• In 1977, the first Commodore home computer boasted 8000 bytes
• IBM made a commercially available computer that had 1GB. It cost $140,000
• In 1982, Commodore 64 upped the ante with 64,000 bytes in a home computer
• In 1994, the first Zip Drive showcased a staggering 100,000 bytes
• Since 2000, computing capacity has increased exponentially, from 1-GB iPods in 2002 to our current 32GB iPod Touch models, but...

                   (And quite remarkably, when you consider our in-class capacity)

• Our entire computer lab currently has less than 1000GB total capacity (which is really pretty good!)

It seems negligent to do anything but take advantage of this computing power! Can't wait to see the results, especially with the upcoming arrival of our SmartBoard.

Let me know what you think!