🙋♂️ Internet blocking, playing with fire, and more – Of Bits and Bytes for April 22, 2024
Internet Travels
Of bits and bytes is my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week
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Google, Slack, Dropbox, and more have all made it way to easy to share information. Unfortunately, the easier you make things also makes it easy to complicate things.
A lot of teachers like to live dangerously, but I wonder how true it is that they know they’re playing with fire when using tech in the classroom. When someone has issues with tech, it doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when they act like they shouldn’t know how to fix it or they don’t apply any sort of problem solving technique. Not knowing how to use tech in 2024 is akin to not knowing how to read and write 100 years ago. I should get that on a t-shirt. Or at least a sticker.
Do you complain about your overzealous internet filter at your school? You’re probably not alone. Internet filtering can be a touchy subject, but a lot of things that are being blocked are not required by the federal law CIPA. Following CIPA requirements is required from school districts that receive Erate monies, so it’s something that almost every district has to do. Do you have any good filtering stories? Let me know!
There is a teacher in my district who’s child goes to a different school district. The teacher asks me questions about how their child’s district configures their Chromebook, and the nearest I can tell is that the district’s tech department has gone above and beyond ruling with an iron fist and are approaching diamond fist territory. The students can’t even access the settings on their Chromebooks. Just because you can lock them down tighter than Fort Knox doesn’t mean you should.
why is my schools filter so bad! – Imgflip
Apps
A nifty set of AI tools over at Hugging Face.
If you’re using Google Keep for your task list be prepared to switch to Google Tasks. I have been playing around with Google Tasks. They’re pretty good for a start, but too limited once you really want to start managing your to dos.
Pedagogy
Some new research is out on the importance of touch. I’ll forgive you if you missed it since the title of the paper is A systematic review and multivariate meta-analysis of the physical and mental health benefits of touch interventions.
Technology
If you wanted more of Meta (the parent of Facebook) in your life, then I’ve got good news for you. They are looking at bringing their VR headsets into education.
* Future jobs will require ‘cognitive skills’ AI can’t do | Fortune
Tips
And there was great rejoicing, Google has added dark mode to Google Drive on the web. I’m pretty old school and view dark mode as a throwback to the green screens of MSDOS, but there are times when it comes in handy.
Google posted a listicle on 8 Google Classroom tips teachers should know, but it’s more of an advertisement to get districts to upgrade to one of the paid Google Workspace tiers. Five of the tips require a license for Google Workspace for Education Plus or the Teaching & Learning Upgrade.
Pop Culture
I liked my junk food growing up, but I’m lucky because junk food back then was practically health food compared to the dreck available today. And that’s not a good thing because research is showing that eating junk food during childhood may lead to long-term, irreversible memory issues.
Unfortunately for those with ADHD, the symptoms persist into adulthood. However, this isn’t surprising because there is growing research that ADHD had some desirable traits for hunters and gatherers.
Potpourri
One of my favorite pasttimes is programming. I like to write scripts and apps, mainly for the puzzle solving aspect. Hopefully that will fall under the guise of mentally stimulating work which can stave off dementia.
Meme of the day 😉 : r/ProgrammerHumor
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