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"Apple is launching a new Measure app in iOS 12 in the next few months that will let you size anything with just your iPhone. You no longer have to go searching for a tape measure while hanging pictures or when trying to determine if a couch will fit in your living room. I recently tried the new Measure app in Apple's iOS 12 developer beta. It uses the advanced cameras on newer iPhones like the iPhone X, and will presumably work on Apple's new batch of devices coming soon. Other augmented reality apps - the type that let you interact with the real world through your phone - have been available in the iTunes App Store and for Android phones. But this is the first time Apple has introduced its own version. Here's a preview."

"Everyone agrees that it's important for children to learn new technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, and virtual reality. The challenge lies in finding the best way to teach those skills to young students. Plenty of organizations have taken on that challenge and have come up with creative ways to teach kids about technology while allowing them to have fun as they learn. One of those companies is 3DBear, a Finnish startup founded three years ago by Jussi Kajala and Kristo Lehtonen. 3DBear is an app that allows children to 3D design their own toys in augmented reality. Available for both iOS and Android, the app is simple enough for kids to use, allowing them to superimpose their own designs on their surroundings using their phone's camera. Kajala and Lehtonen wanted to capitalize on the popularity of such games as Pokémon Go and use the appeal of augmented reality to educate, not just entertain."

"You either love them or hate them. Some educators feel like using QR codes are unnecessary; why not just give kids a shortened URL? Last year, I asked my high school students what they thought about QR codes as a way to access information in my Library Learning Commons. Responses varied slightly, but the general consensus was: "Nah. We don't use them." "They're lame, Sorry Miss." Then came the iOS 11 update about a month ago. This update turned the iphone camera into a QR code scanner."

"Those itching to get to grips with neural networks are in luck: Google offshoot AIY Projects has recently revamped its Voice and Vision Kits. These project-in-a-pack kits give you all you need to build an intelligent speaker or camera."

"Millions of people-perhaps you're one of them-have watched viral videos of a Scottish granny collapsing in laughter while she reads to a baby. Comfortable on a sofa with her grandson, Janice Clark keeps cracking up as she tries to read "The Wonky Donkey" and, in a second video recorded a few months later, "I Need a New Bum." Her raspy burr sounds great, and she's fun to watch, but the real genius of the scene is what's happening to the baby. Tucked beside her, he's totally enthralled by the book in her hands. In the second video especially, because he's older, you can see his eyes tracking the illustrations, widening in amazement each time that she turns the page. He's guileless, unaware of the camera. He has eyes only for the pictures in the book. What's happening to that baby is both obvious and a secret marvel. A grandmother is weeping with laughter as she reads a story, and her grandson is drinking it all in-that's obvious. The marvel is hidden inside the child's developing brain. There, the sound of her voice, the warmth of her nearness and, crucially, the sight of illustrations that stay still and allow him to gaze at will, all have the combined effect of engaging his deep cognitive networks. "

"While the original layout for the app was quite straight-forward, Snapchat has now evolved into a jack of all trades. The app offers direct communication like texting, calling, video messaging, and more with friends and family in a one-on-one messenger style, lets people record and post their videos and photos to their Snapchat Story that last 24-hours while giving people the option to save their Snapchat Stories to their camera roll, and delivers current news and information from credible sources and entertainment sites like IGN, The Economist, Refinery29, Mashable, Harper's Bazaar, VICE, National Geographic, CNN, The New York Times, and so, so much more."

"Adobe is getting into the mobile scanning game with a new free iOS and Android app that is supposed to provide users with high-quality images of physical content they want to capture digitally. It's called Adobe Scan, and it works similarly to a bunch of other apps already available. Users point their smartphone cameras at whatever document, white board, or presentation screen they want to capture, and the app automatically crops the image to just pick out a document. The clearest difference between Scan and other apps, like Microsoft Lens, is that the app integrates with Adobe Document Cloud and automatically performs optical character recognition on the PDFs it generates. Users can then copy and paste text from those documents into other files."

"Peering up, a teacher asked me, "What are we going to use it for?" as I flew our shiny new drone up between the umbrellas on the quad, past the roof of the gym, and into the low scattered clouds. The camera projected back to my iPhone, and I could see the newly planted trees in our quad, the only green for miles in the Mondrian concrete grid that is our local community. The students and teachers in the quad all looked up too, shielding their eyes to see the drone fly. Our custodians pulled up in their cart, and my assistant principal whooped like one of the middle schoolers on my campus. Get the best of Edutopia in your inbox each week. It's my job this year to answer questions like the one above. As a teacher on special assignment currently serving as curriculum coordinator for my school, I get to learn what's coming our way and devise methods of implementation. I specialize in technology and project-based learning, and I began thinking about implementing the drone immediately upon hearing that our district had purchased it. And I'm not the only one thinking about this issue. In the book Drones in Education, the International Society for Technology in Education touts the engagement factor but also sees academic potential in using drones. To guide schools to successfully implement the technology, the book promotes the SOAR model, which stands for Safety (ethics and legal use), Operation (flight and maintenance), Active learning (engagement in problem solving), and Research (practical applications)."

"Available as a web-based tool or an iPad application, Padlet allows teachers and students to create virtual bulletin boards where collaboration, reflection, publishing and sharing of information can occur. As a synchronous learning environment, Padlet supports interaction, sharing, and collaboration in real-time or as an asynchronous learning environment allowing students to learn at their own pace and time. When using Padlet, users can display information in a wide variety of file types, including: links to Google Docs, display images of student work, text, audio reflections, and videos from the camera roll or YouTube. Padlet's formats  allow for a more customized experience for users. A mind-mapping format called Canvas provides the opportunity to move sticky notes to facilitate the creation of mind maps. Users  create visual connections among concepts, facts, and thoughts while providing a way to organize and synthesize information. Recently, I've begun to use Canvas as my "go to" mind-mapping tool. The Canvas format enables teachers and students to work collaboratively across devices and settings while helping learners to see relationships between concepts.  Canvas gives students a way to visually represent their thinking while providing teachers insight into a student's understanding of a specific concept or idea."

Great resource for all manner of things related to Film. From camera angles and shots to plans for running film clubs, this is a site worth diving into.

A wealth of information can be found on this site for the exploration of film. Do check out the comprehensive Film Club section if you are thinking of running an ECA on film.

"In an era of breakneck change and tech innovation, evaluating dyslexia in young students looks much the same today as it has in the past: A struggling reader's parents and teachers might sit down, gather information and assess the child on their strengths and weaknesses to determine a diagnosis and appropriate interventions. Often this is done via paper tests-despite the growing usage of predictive analytics in schools, where there are seemingly as many data dashboards as students in a classroom. All that's to say, it seems like an industry almost too tempting for deep-pocketed tech investors and an ambitious startup with an eye on using machine learning to trim the fat. "Today's methods are quite cumbersome," explains Frederik Wetterhall, the CEO and co-founder of Lexplore, a company that has devised a dyslexia screening tool that pairs eye tracking cameras with AI and algorithms. "With paper- and pen-based tests, it's quite hard to read the results and takes a lot of time. [Educators] ask, 'Who are the kids we think have difficulties?' and they miss a lot of kids.""

"Do you have a great picture on your Mac within Photos app that you want to share? Photos for Mac makes sharing pictures, videos, and other images very easy, and you share a picture from the Mac directly to another user through messages, email, iCloud, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, or locally to another nearby Mac or iOS user through AirDrop. You can share any picture this way as long as you have the image, video, or picture stored within the Photos app on Mac. Whether the pictures were copied from an iPhone or camera to Photos on Mac or imported into Photos on Mac doesn't matter, the pictures just must be contained within the Photos application in Mac OS. It's worth pointing out that we're focusing on sharing pictures here, but the Photos app also holds videos and Live Photos, which can be shared the exact same way."

"Earlier in the school year my students created whole-class videos using our large green screen studio. While I assigned students a variety of tasks (director, camera operator, acting coach), my students spent the majority of their time on the carpet as an audience member. At the end of these units I wondered how we could increase student ownership of the production. Could I have my students create a green screen movie without having to play the audience member for large portions of the time? Could they be empowered to create a movie independently of the teacher? Could this be done by kindergartners and first graders? For most of the school year I struggled with these questions. That was until I met Brenda Windsor and Mary O'Neil of Trumbull, CT at the Fairfield University "Education Technology Collaboration Day" in March.  Brenda and Mary presented on how they have incorporated green screens in the classroom, and shared the idea of using a pizza box to make a miniature portable studio. Here is a link to the video they created.  From that moment, I was on a mission to have my K-2 students write, direct, film & star in their own collaborative group mini green screen movies. "

"It's hard to feel connected to someone who's gone through a static photo. So a company called MyHeritage who provides automatic AI-powered photo enhancements is now offering a new service that can animate people in old photos creating a short video that looks like it was recorded while they posed and prepped for the portrait. Called Deep Nostalgia, the resulting videos are reminiscent of the Live Photos feature in iOS and iPadOS where several seconds of video are recorded and saved before and after the camera app's shutter is pressed. But where Live Photos is intended to be used to find the perfect shot and framing that may have been missed the exact second the shutter was pressed, Deep Nostalgia is instead meant to bring still shots, even those not captured on a modern smartphone, to life."

"A year into the pandemic, the instructional sands keep shifting from in-person, to remote, to concurrent (or hybrid) and back again. And almost every conversation I have with educators regardless of whether they are classroom teachers, instructional specialists or administrators is around student engagement. Sometimes these conversations are with administrators concerned about the increasing numbers of students on the schools D-F list or with teachers disconsolate about students who won't turn on their cameras, turn in work or participate in discussions and whose attendance (virtual or in-person) is sporadic at best. All of them are asking, with some urgency, about how we can boost student engagement under these difficult and fluctuating circumstances. From my vantage point, the causes and symptoms are multi-faceted. We need to partner with students-individually and collectively-to discover the root causes and empower them to be their own antidotes."

"Just eight years ago, in MAKE Volume 03, Saul Griffith provided a detailed list of "The Maker's Ultimate Tools" that would allow a maker to "make pretty much anything." Unfortunately, only a real-life Tony Stark could afford every item on that list, which included a $1,000,000 excimer laser cutter, a $150,000 NC (numerically controlled) lathe, and a $100,000 water jet. Fortunately for kids today, prices have dropped, tools have become easier to obtain (and use), and fundraising has never been simpler. Let's take a look at what tools, options, and pricesare a good fit for a kid-focused makerspace, and how schools and other organizations can achieve funding to get more of these kids into the workshop and making things."