Group items tagged

This section of Navigator is the entryway to the extensive listings of vetted projects exploring uses of emerging technologies contained in the Horizon Project data set — easily the largest database of its kind in the world.

A recent study of Google+ showed that it is more popular with parents than students,  which could be a favorable indicator of how popular it is for those educators of the same generation.

One example of how teachers are using Google+ Pages to run their classrooms, is that of Mr. McDowell who teaches World History at West Hills High School. Mr. McDowell has made great use of Google’s tools to give students access to documents, schedules, presentations, videos and password protected areas like attendance and grade records.

access to Google+ tools and pages from any computer promotes interactivity on the site and is a big hit with educators

Exporting & Saving One thing that SVG can’t do is save the resulting image as a bitmap. It’s easy for <canvas> because the element is already a bitmap in the first place! The canvas can export its image to a data URL (e.g., data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGg...). This data may then be rendered in the browser, which could then be saved or dragged to the desktop, used in a new canvas, and so on. The browser must support PNG images, and it may have varying support for GIF and JPG. For our example, we’ll stick with PNG since it supports alpha transparency, and where we haven’t drawn on the canvas, it’ll be transparent. To get the data URL, we simply call canvas.toDataURL('image/png'). Note that we’re calling toDataURL() on the <canvas> element, not on the 2D context. This is because we’re getting all the pixels in the canvas, not just the pixels in a particular context. So taking the example we’ve put together already, we’ll make the browser redirect to a PNG version of the image when a user clicks on the <canvas> element (a contrived example, I know!): canvas.onclick = function () {  window.location = canvas.toDataURL('image/png');};

Twaining in Twitter, Terence Wing, Learning solutions magazine, 3 February 2011

Twitter in education, what next? presentation by Dave Hopkins, 11 September 2010

A framework for teaching with Twitter, Mark Sample, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 August 2010

So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction? The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."

In the paper he outlines give principles of contemplative computing; Build awareness through DIY and self-experimentation Recognize that we are cyborgs, and humans Create rewarding challenges Support mind-wandering Treat flow as a means, not an end

Pang suggests that we don't have to choose between information technology and contemplation, and suggests contemplative computing as a new way forward. He describes contemplative computing as something you do, not a product. But the principles of contemplative computing could be extending to application design. "The problem is that today's information technologies are often poorly-designed and thoughtlessly used: they're like unreliable prosthetics that we have to depend on, but can't quite control or trust," Pang says.