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A bit more thorough overview of the upcoming iOS releases' features than the one I provided.
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Good review from Wired magazine of today's newly announced iPod lineup.
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No mention of it at today's Apple event, but the venerable iPod classic is still available if you'd prefer more storage space for your mdia (albeit in a larger device).
Stratepedia Blog: Technology news for strategic instruction.
links for 2010-09-02
What is Priority Inbox?
In the upcoming week, Google is releasing a new feature in Gmail known as Priority Inbox. This tool, an addition to your existing Gmail account, allows email to be sorted according to importance. Google tags the messages of most importance to you (bills, notifications, notes from Mom) and marks them as the first to be read. You decide what is important and can makes changes as you go.
links for 2010-09-01
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Nice summary of today's Apple product announcements (iOS updates, new iPods, new Apple TV). We'll be covering things in more detail in the next few days.
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Excellent, level-headed editorial on the damages done when schools "block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society." Please read this and share it with others.
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Thankfully broken down into subject areas. Lots of good apps, many of which are free (or cheap).
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The sale of virtual good is making its way to real-world stores.
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Another interactive, animated book for the iPad has ReadWriteWeb thinking about this format as the future of electronic books. I think he's right that there will be many formats, depending on the content and the audience.
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Twitter's made a major (but good) change in how their login system works. If you're using an old Twitter client you might have problems accessing Twitter. Here's why and what you can do to get your Twitter back.
Create a VoiceThread with Sue Woodruff
Susan Woodruff is an independent professional developer and active member of the International SIM Network. She recently began experimenting with VoiceThread and ways to apply this collaborative tool to education. Read her experience below.
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As I was playing around on the Internet and doing some web surfing the other day, I found an interesting application. Actually, it is the one I’ve been looking for (not all that hard) for almost a year. For a SIM professional developer, instructional coach, students, and teachers alike, I think the only limits of it are our own creativity. Let me start back about a year ago when my son came home from his Advanced College Calculus class. He was a sophomore last year in college, and he had always done well in math. Last year, however, the course was much more challenging. In about the second or third week of school, he came home all excited and wanted to show me how his professor was going to work with her students who had questions. He got online and went to a website. There he was able to access a video she had recorded where she worked through a problem mentally and modeled her problem solving process. Stephen said it was incredibly helpful. What he liked was that he could access it multiple times. Anytime he was doing homework and felt “stuck” he had access to his professor’s thinking by going to that website.
Back to the present…as I was goofing off and procrastinating the other day, I found a short article and demonstration of a VoiceThread. It is actually an online free website that can be used for teaching, collaborating, coaching, nearly anything that you can think of. Documents, videos, pictures, and nearly any other type of document can be uploaded to the site. The creator of a voice thread can comment on it while annotating through a webcam, microphone, or text. Once it is uploaded, others can be invited to view it, or it can be put on the website to be viewed by the public. It is quite simple to learn, and it is actually quite fun after you get used to looking at yourself on the videocamera. I did find that I had to switch my Adobe Flash settings on my Mac, so if you have any trouble recording, check those. I would love to collaborate with a few of you who might want to work on a presentation of something. The VoiceThread is so interactive that it almost feels like someone is there. For only $60 per year, you can buy a subscription that allows you to use a lot more features of the site. My mind is generating all kinds of great ways this could be used. Please check out voicethreads.com, and let us know what you think about it and if you have any great ideas for using it. I’ve made a VoiceThread just for you to check out. If you are brave, take a moment and respond with a note in the following VoiceThread. OK?
-Sue
Interested in writing an article for the Stratepedia blog? Just email Aaron or Amber with your ideas at help@stratepedia.org.
links for 2010-08-31
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More information on Inkling, a new textbook reader for the iPad. I'm looking forward to checking this out.
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Good tips for knowing when and how to put the gadgets aside for a little while.
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Useful for those of you who may have put Google Wave to use before they pulled the plug on it a few weeks ago.
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New Gmail feature filters important e-mail from the rest so you can read it first.
links for 2010-08-30
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Beautiful, educational photos from NASA's archives are now available for viewing and download from Flickr. Definitely worth a visit.
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I've gotten a few shady-looking requests on Facebook recently. This post on Lifehacker walks you through some steps for making sure requests are legit.
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Too early to tell for sure, but the second edition of the massive multi-volume dictionary of the English language (from 1989) could be the last printed version.
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Interesting approach to keeping up on RSS feeds.
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Great list, not just for teachers–professional developers should get to know Dropbox, Delicious, Doodle, and Zamzar in particular.
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New Ning group for educators interested in iPads.
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Nice critique of the state of magazines on the iPad. I expect the user experience of magazines on tablets to only get better as competition joins the fray.
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Good read on the requirements for would-be education (technology) startups of the 21st century. Definitely some good points across the board, but I imagine some of them (1 and 5 in particular) would have their naysayers. What do you think?
Looking at data visually
It’s not that I’m sharing video of TED talks every Monday morning; it’s just that they make it so darn easy. Today is David McCandless’ talk from this past July about “beautiful data.” I had a couple of takeaways from this: First, sometimes the raw numbers don’t tell the story (or the whole story, at least); and second, sometimes it takes more than one set of data to really gain some perspective on an issue. McCandless’ visualizations illustrate these points in the video below.
Want to see more of McCandless’ work? Check out his blog Information is Beautiful.
links for 2010-08-28
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Great perspective from a student whose professor created a Facebook group for out-of-classroom discussions. I don't think the University of Kansas (our employer) allows this; does your school?
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Report of a small study looking at non-anonymous social networking (versus older, anonymous online systems). Are you surprised about what they found?
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That last one–you're fighting a losing battle–needs to be reiterated.





