Thanks to technologies like GPS and QR codes, these games combine real-world experiences with virtual information. The games can capture geo-tagged audio recordings, for example, or photos and videos that student players can view when they reach a particular place or meet a particular character. Characters can talk with students, provide information, exchange items or respond to tasks. Authors can also create virtual items that players can retrieve and exchange.
The key is the ARIS platform, which enables teachers, designers, artists, and students to create place-based narratives. Game designers say the open-source platform is easy to use; educators don't need a programming background to get started because the work is done with an online authoring tool.
Occasionally there is a piece software that comes along which astonishes me that I can download it for free. We have been recently investigating the ability for our users to sync their docs with a cloud service, primarily for backup.
We have looked at Google Drive, DropBox and SkyDrive and there are many others. All have advantages / disadvantages however there is one thing that none of them seem to do - local storage. We simply can't have 1,500 users all trying to sync to the Internet and expect it to work across our 50 meg pipe. We need it to be stored locally, on one of our servers. Sure we'll need tons of storage and won't have intercontinental redundancy and failover, but let's be honest we are not backing up nuclear launch codes here. One large RAID 5 storage should do the trick.
"In a recent post, Edudemic introduced us to a very intricate, color-coded visualization by Envisioning Tech on what to expect in education technology in the next 30 years or so. And these concepts are not broad generalizations- Envisioning Tech takes topics like digitized classrooms and tangible computing and segments them into practical ideas to produce a well-organized, cohesive diagram"
A new Creative Commons license chooser launched this week. The very simple interface presents four boxes that update dynamically as users select options and complete attribution metadata.
After completing the form, users are presented with a suggested license, a choice of regular or compact size icons, and embed code for inserting their license on a web page.
This how-to guide is supposed to walk you through the steps to make your idea for an iPhone app a reality. This post presents various ideas, techniques, tips, and resources that may come in handy if you are planning on creating your first iPhone application.
"... despite how crucial GitHub is to the developer toolbox, I'm constantly wondering why the platform is limited to just code. It's not a stretch to imagine the usefulness of a similar platform for non-developers - authors, teachers, students - though as much as I search, I can't seem to find one. So I'm building it myself. I'm building a GitHub for everyone else."
Another point of view on the debate between 'poetry' and 'coding'
Hospitals aren't factories that produce well people, schools aren't factories that produce educated people. They are doing something non-market in some really foundational way and that is not subject to automation in the same way that other things are.
It's the people who get something about the tech world, and people who get something about human nature, psychology, marketing persuasion, whatever, those will be the top earners.
"Australia finally has its first digital technology curriculum which is mandatory for all Australian children from Foundation, the name replacing kindergarten, to Year 8. The Technologies area now has two individual but connected compulsory subjects: Design and Technologies, where students use critical thinking to create innovative solutions for authentic problems
Digital Technologies, where students using computational thinking and information systems to implement digital solutions."
"What excited me about the Digital Technologies curriculum in particular is the way that it has embraced the Digital Technologies as a way of thinking and a tool for creativity. The problem I've always had with the teaching of ICT in schools is that it has largely been seen as a tool that should be integrated to assist the teaching of other subjects - that's fine, but that's captured in the ICT General Capability in the Australian Curriculum and is very different to the study of ICT as a discipline, sometimes branded as Computer Science, Informatics, Computing or similar. Given the ubiquitous nature of ICT in our world today, it has always struck me as odd that we've relegated the understanding of ICT to being all about its use, rather than how it manages to achieve the "magic" that many people mistake it to be."
"SNAPCHAT users may be in for a not-so-pleasant surprise this Christmas.
Hackers could gain access to the phone numbers and names of the app's users because of a loophole in its coding and API (application programming interface), a new report from online security firm Gibson Security has revealed."
"Google's Go language is, not surprisingly, particularly well-suited to cloud development. But according to Rob Pike, one of Go's designers, Go's creators were originally trying to improve C++ but found it "too difficult to couple [necessary] concurrent operations with C++'s control structures, and in turn that made it too hard to see the real advantages." Eventually he gave it up because "C++ just made it all seem too cumbersome.""
Whilst some kids will tolerate not having a greater imperative for learning other than, it will be on the test, or they, might need it when they’re older, for a great deal of students this is the first step towards disengagement.