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"The new Smart Strings section in GarageBand for iOS is a real gem, but its true power is easily missed. Learn how to use it effectively with this 7 minute tutorial video from Lynda.com. For the full 2.5 hour GarageBand course, head on over to Lynda.com."

"Last week, Mona Lisa smiled. A big, wide smile, followed by what appeared to be a laugh and the silent mouthing of words that could only be an answer to the mystery that had beguiled her viewers for centuries. A great many people were unnerved. Ars Technica Join Ars Technica and Get Our Best Tech Stories DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX. SIGN ME UP Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy Mona's "living portrait," along with likenesses of Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dali, and others, demonstrated the latest technology in deepfakes-seemingly realistic video or audio generated using machine learning. Developed by researchers at Samsung's AI lab in Moscow, the portraits display a new method to create credible videos from a single image. With just a few photographs of real faces, the results improve dramatically, producing what the authors describe as "photorealistic talking heads." The researchers (creepily) call the result "puppeteering," a reference to how invisible strings seem to manipulate the targeted face. And yes, it could, in theory, be used to animate your Facebook profile photo. But don't freak out about having strings maliciously pulling your visage anytime soon. "Nothing suggests to me that you'll just turnkey use this for generating deepfakes at home. Not in the short-term, medium-term, or even the long-term," says Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. The reasons have to do with the high costs and technical know-how of creating quality fakes-barriers that aren't going away anytime soon."

"There has been a string of high-profile cases where children have racked up thousands of dollars in credit card charges through in-app purchases. In these cases and others like them, the iOS devices used by the children have not been properly locked down by the parents. In this three-part series, we will show you how to set up a kid-friendly iTunes account, lock down your device to prevent in-app purchases and perform some maintenance that'll prevent your tot from sending emails or tweeting on your behalf. You can jump into part two below, where we take a deep dive into the settings and show you how to lockdown your iOS device. "

"CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. The activities introduce students to Computational Thinking through concepts such as binary numbers, algorithms and data compression, separated from the distractions and technical details of having to use computers. Importantly, no programming is required to engage with these ideas! CS Unplugged is suitable for people of all ages, from elementary school to seniors, and from many countries and backgrounds. Unplugged has been used around the world for over twenty years, in classrooms, science centers, homes, and even for holiday events in a park!"

"Social media is fascinating.  It's the double edged sword of the 21st century.  It can highlight the good and it can put a magnifying glass on the bad.  There is a story going viral right now about a teen having her birthday party alone. I love that this teen is going to be flooded with cards that will likely mean more to her than any of us can comprehend.  It's going to be a really awesome surprise for her. But, then I start to get frustrated.  The string of people proclaiming, "I'm sending a card," goes viral.  Everyone proclaiming how terrible it is for this teen to be alone on her birthday.  Everyone who must not have any true idea of what autism is really like for families, for children, and for the world."

"Brain scans show a complex string of numbers and letters in mathematical formulae can evoke the same sense of beauty as artistic masterpieces and music from the greatest composers."

"When electrical engineering professor Dr. Karen Shoop of Queen Mary University in London took her first knitting workshop, she noticed immediately that knitting is very similar to writing computer code. "I noticed that knitting instructions are largely binary (like computers) - in other words, knit or purl," she said. "More interesting were the knitting instructions, which read just like regular expressions [of code], used for string matching and manipulation when coding." Shoop also recognizes that the earliest stages of computing were inspired by handwork: "Of course, computers ultimately started off partially inspired by weaving and the Jacquard loom, or earlier Bouchon's loom. Arguably some of the earliest programmers were the people making the card/paper punch hole patterns for weaving patterns.""

"I took piano lessons as a kid, but it's hard lugging a piano around when you want to take your tune-playing on the road.  I tried teaching myself some chords on the guitar, but it turns out that you need big, strong hands to press down on the strings hard enough to make music. My hands are neither big, nor are they strong. So instead I picked up the ukulele, and, using YouTube, taught myself how to play.  The problem is, I've run out of songs to play that are remedial enough for me to learn. That's where Riffstation Play comes in."

"Stop Motion was one of the original video creation techniques. By stringing together a series of single images and displaying them quickly in order, film was born. Now on iPad, Stop Motion can be used as a technique for capturing learning as it happens, making drawings, models, science projects, or counting exercises come alive. Consider the power of creating a digital flipbook that could later be viewed as a video. Introduction to KomaKoma KomaKoma is a FREE Stop Motion iPad App that can compile together a series of photos taken in the app and then export them to the Camera Roll as a video. With a simple user interface consisting of only a few buttons, KomaKoma is very intuitive. The app launches the camera automatically (first time app users will have to allow the Camera access). A big red record button captures each image in sequence, and a big green play button plays the images back as a video. The only other 2 editing buttons are a blue "X" to delete the last image taken, and a yellow arrow for saving the video to the app's Gallery. "

If you have a good search string and you'd like to share that go to, ggl.to , a web service that provides short, easily typed aliases for web searches for sharing in chat and Twitter.

"Imagine you could create a single button on your iPhone that does whatever you want. Want to order an Uber for your next Calendar event? Easy. Want a button designated for calling mom? Done. Wish you could tap a button and get directions to the nearest coffee shop? Who wouldn't? Want to tweet the last photo you took or song you're listening to? Just drag and drop each step of the process inside of Workflow and it turns into its own app. That's the concept behind Workflow, a new app designed to save you time by allowing you to string together various tasks and combine them into one action. You can then turn that action into an app on your homescreen or add it to your iPhone's share screen so you always have quick access."

"At the end of 2016, I found myself mentally exhausted and barely able to string together a coherent thought or formulate an original idea. As I swiped through my social media feeds for inspiration-or maybe procrastination-a nagging feeling hit. I needed a break from screen time. Pediatricians, psychologists, and neuroscientists warn of potential negative consequences associated with constant mental stimulation as a result of interacting with our devices. Without a screen-free space for my brain to relax, stop firing, and just think, I felt incapable of significant mental processing. I could blame the technology for thwarting my attempts at creative thought, or I could blame myself for taking the easy route and using my devices to constantly stimulate my brain. Though I chose to blame myself, I am finding a lot of support for the idea of blaming technology when discussing the idea of screen time. Get the best of Edutopia in your inbox each week. Mobile devices have the potential to provide amazing learning opportunities as well as great distractions. They can further social interactions to help us build stronger connections in our communities, or allow us to destroy relationships by hiding behind a screen. In the book The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education, authors Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge describe three essential skills for surviving in a society increasingly dominated by internet-enabled devices: focusing on ourselves, tuning in to others, and understanding the larger world. While the authors apply these concepts to the broader field of social and emotional learning, these same foci also apply as we address the issue of screen time with our students and children."

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them "educated" when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a "literacy" in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they've pretty much delivered what we've asked them to.