riderhoist

While Google is fast for searching, sometimes you want it even faster. Enter the Guru. The Guru is a contact you can add to your Google Talk IM client and you can ask it anything. It will instantly respond with the answer.

ProfHacker is a blog that used to be independent but was recently absorbed into the Chronicle of Higher Education. As its name hopes to imply, it focuses largely upon technology for higher education with the posts seemingly about equally divided between aids to pedagogy and productivity tools.

I think anyone teaching online courses would benefit from subscribing to ProfHacker.

During our Ten Technologies discussion we talked for a few minutes about internet security and passwords. This article gives you times for each type of password you use.

HP has started to make headway at becoming the "educational" tablet platform. This is not the rumored WebOS tablet for education they are apparently working on. This product will let a teacher use that sketch pad like a portable whiteboard that will be projected

I agree that its still a bit early to have iPads as a textbook replacement but I'm very eager to spur schools towards this.

Really interesting article about a startup company that is using virtualization as a way for schools to save on buying new machines/software. Basically you work on a virtual iteration of an OS running from a single machine so the hardware in your machine does not matter.

This is an UNCONFIRMED rumor circulating that the NY Times pay website system might cost up to $20/month. Lets hope it is not true and is a lot less.

When I was teaching music in a public high school in South Jersey, I used Guitar Hero and Wii Music a lot to teach basic rhythm and a bunch of other things. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone teaching math with a Wii.

An unexpected move today from Google executives. Eric Schmidt is stepping aside as Google's CEO

Internet security is a very hot topic as of late. This Lifehacker article details a few ways to see if someone else is using your Wireless internet connection.  While use of the connection may not be a problem, an adept user can easily gain access to your own computers and files.

I vote we purchase these for all faculty to have students lock their phones up at the beginning of class.

A pretty interesting article about how we are a lot like a smartphone

I know that when it comes to online document creation, Google Docs is the dominant option, but a few months ago Microsoft rolled out its own online web apps based on Office. It is free to sign up and gives you full MS Office programs in your web browser. While Google Docs offers a relatively limited amount of editing options Office Web Apps is nearly an option for option recreation of the full standing program. I am also a very big fan of OneNote which is a really cool note taking program for MS. I have not had too much luck finding a comparable program and being able to have access to those Notes is a pretty nice benefit. You also get online storage (up to 25gb!) and it is free.

An interesting article about using Twitter for productivity as well as social networking

Each topic page collects all the news, reference and archival information, photos, graphics, audio and video files published on topics ranging from Madonna to Myanmar. This treasure trove is available without charge on articles going back to 1981.

NYTimes education site. 

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.www.theRSA.org

Rémi Denis-Courmont [who is a lead contributor to the VLC project, and therefore had the grounds to pursue a licensing claim based on his included and GPL'ed code within the VLC iOS app -Ed.] waged a one-man campaign against Applidium's iOS port of VLC, claiming the app violated the GNU public license (GPL) because App Store purchases have Digital Rights Management (DRM) applied to them. The end result seems somewhat counterproductive, because now unless you downloaded VLC before it was pulled from the App Store, you can't install it on your iOS device at all. So much for ensuring that VLC can be freely distributed.

With so many startups on the scene, it is easy to get lost. Fortunately, most innovation is centered around a short list of fundamental ideas. In this post, we'll walk through nine clusters of education tech companies.

4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web