📺 Curated videos, teenage sleep, public domain books, and more – Edcerpts for February 20, 2023

Internet Travels

Edcerpts are my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week

Apps

The Kid Should See This is a curated collection of over 5,000 kid friendly videos from across the web. The videos are organized by topic or you can search. And by organized by topic, I mean they are organized by topics! One very cool topic is how things are made. Want to know how to make a thermometer or how to tie a bow tie? They’ve got you covered.

Pedagogy

At this point it seems to be like beating a dead horse on important sleep is for teenagers, but if you need more data on it, Scientific America can help.

“The extreme always seems to make an impression”, so when I see a title such as Using Ridiculous Rituals to Build Classroom Community, you can color me intrigued. Jen Haisma seems to be pretty good at it. Being ridiculous is a form of play, and Aviva Dunsiger wonders if play can be used to build stamina.

Technology

I’m sure this won’t cause tech support issues, the IT department said sarcastically, after Google announced that Chromebooks will finally allow users to set their own keyboard shortcuts. It’s not a problem when someone sets the search key to Caps Lock, but it makes it hard to track down issues.

Tips

I’ve presented several times on making yourself more productive, and here’s a look at programmers improving through incremental automation. I love that saying, and while the article won’t appeal to most in the education community, its message is one that resonates with me. Anyone that attended the Ohio Educational Technology Conference this past weekend probably has a good chance of coming back feeling overwhelmed.

That’s where the idea of incremental automation comes in to play. You don’t have to do everything now, just start small. When I recommend to others to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as they can, I don’t expect them to be able to know them all right away. In my presentation I recommended that participants write down a couple of the shortcuts they want to learn on post it notes and put those notes on their monitor. Once the shortcuts become muscle memory, replace those post in notes with other shortcuts.

Pop Culture

This past January thousands upon thousands of works entered the public domain. However, copyright law for works published from 1923 to 1964 required the copyright holder to renew their copyright.. Librarians are now going through these works to locate those that may have not been renewed and have then fallen into the public domain.

Do you want to know the easiest way to start an educator fight? Just mention dress codes. No matter what view you have, there will be someone who has the exact opposite opinion.

Pot Pourri

I love math as much as the next person, but this article takes math to a whole new level.

Do you want to learn to communicate with Gen Z? Here are 10 rules to get you started. What’s most shocking is that they differentiate between autocorrected text from a smartphone vs when you use a computer to know where you are .

Seth Godin’s sportscar quadrants reminds me a lot of the tech worlds axiom, “Better, faster, cheaper. Pick any two”. Nothing can be all things to all situations.