Amazon released a new Kindle this week, the Oasis. At 3.4MM thick and 4.6 ounces in weight, it is over half the weight of an iPad mini and almost 50% thinner (44.3% if you want to be pendantic). The downside is that it is $290. But, who buys a black and white Kindle? Readers I…
9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us – Will Richardson Lately, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with our unwillingness to acknowledge these “elephants in the (class)room,” if you will, because the new contexts for modern learning forged by the networked world in which we now live are creating an imperative for new ways of…
A student showed me this video this week in their presentation over the Intel 8088. I had now idea IBM had a portable computer like this available in 1977. Storage consisted of 204KB tapes. Amazing how far we’ve come in 40 years.
When you visit wttr.in, you get a nice console looking weather display. The site tries to geolocate your position from your IP address, but for some reason it brings up Kenton, United Kingdom for me. You can place a zip or locate in the address and it will pull that location’s weather. A neat way…
You can now add questions to Google Classroom for quick polls. There are two answer types, short answer and multiple choice. As it is for polling, there isn’t any option for automatic feedback with the correct answer. Unfortunately, Google still hasn’t added any sort of organizational tool to group items in the classroom or organize…
The Real Value of Computer Science Providing students with open ended opportunities to think critically (with or without coding) creates problem solvers and independence, both of which are required skills for today’s industry. Experts have branded a set of skills as “21 Century Competencies” which include computational thinking. Coding also supports spatial sense and makes…
All the ways iOS 9.3 will impact school iPad rollouts | eSchool News In March, Apple upgraded the iPad and iPhone operating system to iOS 9.3 (quickly followed by iOS 9.3.1, which tweaked a few bugs). The lead up to the release caught the eye of the K-12 community, which had been waiting for a…
I’ve been playing around with gamifying my classroom this semester. After looking at Classcraft I decided I wanted something a little simpler, so I put together a Google Sheet to keep track of XP, AP, and HP. The problem came when I needed to add or subtract a stat from a student. Entering the data…
Is Google teaching us anything? – Shooting Azimuths In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr suggests that the internet is making us dumber. Carr finds that the vast amount of hyperlinked information available on the internet means that depth of knowledge has given way to shallowness. Casually disregarding the internet’s arguably most significant feature, Carr…
Browsers for iOS devices seem to proliferate like so many tribbles, but since they are bound by Apple’s rules, their performance is basically the same. It’s the features that differentiate them. After reading A Few Nice iCab Tricks for 2016, I abruptly spent my $1.99 for iCab Mobile and have been a happy camper ever since….