Merry Christmas!

A url shortener is used to take a very long link and make it shorter. The shorten links are more easily shared then their longer counterparts, since the longer urls may get cut off in email or other ways of messaging. Google offers a url shortener at https://goo.gl, which works well when you want to…
Back in February John Perry Barlow passed away at the age of 70. The name may not be familiar, but he has had a lasting influence on the privacy and freedom of the internet. He was the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit that promotes privacy, freedom, and innovation of the internet. He…
The other thing that is not entirely obvious is that Playgrounds has full access to the entire iOS API. This means that there is effectively no limit on the complexity of Playground that you can build. You can use APIs like Core Location, WebKit, MapKit, Core Motion, Networking and Core Bluetooth. One of the demos…
In Paul Tough’s new book, he writes that the people who are best at engendering “noncognitive”—or character—abilities like grit in students hardly ever mention these skills in the classroom. It’s an observation that has won attention and admirers such as New York Times columnist David Brooks. But what has been left unsaid is how our…
Read is part 4 of a 13 part series, 13 Ways Teachers Can Hack Their Learning. Read! No, I’m not being ironic. Reading is a pretty popular activity in the United States, with over 75% of adults having read at least one book in the last year. As school teachers, we get caught up in all of the…
Each night this week, Kellian Adams-Pletcher and her husband Brian have looked out from their Somerville, Mass., home and seen the same thing: dozens of people, all sitting in the tiny park across the street, mobile phones in hand. The crowds are, of course, hunting for elusive digital monsters in the augmented reality game Pokémon…