Heading home

outstanding trip and I have learned a great deal about Japan. However, I am anxious to see my family.

I want to highlight a few trips that we made at the end of this week.

First, we visited the Panasonic Center on Thursday. We observed some

cutting-edge technology including their 3-D tvs including their 3-d

video cameras. We all enjoyed looking at a 3-d tv with our image and

trying to reach out to ourself and have the image reach back. Pretty

cool stuff! Another tv based system was their "Life Wall". This was a huge wall sized "smart" tv. It could display one big screen or multiple small screens. It featured the ability to display different shows on multiple smaller screens for individual viewers. It had some features that were educational based like a built in library of resources (pictures, videos, etc.) This system was more or less a giant computer monitor and tv together. Very cool technology, but very expensive and probably a few years until this is available for consumers.

Yesterday, we visited the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We observed their

trading floor. I had envisioned a floor full of hundreds of people

running around trading stocks. Instead, we saw approximately 20 people sitting at computers monitoring the computerized trading system. The Tokyo stock exchange is the second largest stock exchange behind the New York stock exchange. It was interesting to see the ticker constantly moving and changing in real time. Our guide provided us some information about how all of the world's markets impact and influence

each other. Mr. Holland, EG's Economics Teacher, teaches about this in senior Economics class, and I am anxious to share some resources with him that he can use in class.

This is my last blog. I hope I have been able to provide some quality

information to those following me. I have many more photos and videos

to post on my ning site: http://eghs-japan.ning.com/