🙋‍♂️ Vectorpea – a free Adobe Illustrator clone, Canva whiteboard, your health and grammatical errors, and more – Of bits and bytes for December 11, 2023
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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Apps
When you need to edit a photo, you need a raster editing program like Photoshop. However, there are times when you need a vector editing program like Adobe Illustrator. The people behind the web based Photoshop clone Photopea have released an Adobe Illustrator clone, Vectorpea, for when you need to edit .psd, .ai, .xd, .fig, .sketch, .pdf, and a slew of other formats. It’s not full replacement, but could be useful when you’re in a pinch.
With Google’s Jamboard closing down there has been a lot of discussion with using Figma’s FigJam as a replacement. However, there is also Canva’s Whiteboard, and here’s a good introduction to using it.
Google is replacing Google Drive’s default My Drive view with a new Home view. This view is personalized with suggested files and folders, along with giving you access to different filter chips to help you locate the files you need faster. I’ll try it out and see if I like it better than my bookmark to Google Drives Recent view: https://drive.google.com/drive/recent.
Pedagogy
Do you feel physical pain when you hear grammatical errors? There is new research showing that hearing grammatical errors can affect your heart rate variability.
There has been a lot of debate on where we are going with AI and how it’s going to affect things. Ethan Mollick examines AI and its role in a few different scenarios, with the idea that it can be the “best available human”, but with caveats.
If you teach middle school, then you may what to read about different ways of responding to cheating in middle school.
A new term I heard last week was “snowplow parenting”, where parents remove all obstacles in the path of their children so that they don’t experience pain, failure, or discomfort, which I’m reminded of when I read articles like this one about children lacking spontaneous play.
Technology
What is research? Along the same lines, should you search or browse when you are collecting information. I never thought of the difference before.
Google is showing off Gemini, their competitor to ChatGPT. The demo is very impressive, that is, until you find out that the demo was modified for the video. Several prompts and images were edited out of the demo.
Pop Culture
Do you still dream about school h/t – Archive? I assumed I did because I’m in it every day, but there is more to it.
We give up so much of our personal data every day. So far, the tech hasn’t let companies use everything they see, but AI is going to change that. Now companies and governments will be able to use AI to collect and analyze data at a rate that was unimaginable 10 years ago.
Extra Credit
Here are extra links that I found interesting that may or may not be education related or interesting to you and I didn’t want to lose them.
- We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak
- the art of non-conformity blog – Choose a Life Purpose (Any Purpose Will Do)
- jim-fx’s | Plantarium
- Google Workspace Updates: Create shareable video presentations in Google Slides
- Professionalism And The Software Industry – Flameeyes’s Weblog
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