Group items tagged

"Are you using add-ons for Google Apps? These wonderful tools - available for Documents, Sheets and Forms - make Google Apps even better. One of my favorite add-ons is Doctopus. This tool lets teachers create, manage, organize and evaluate student projects in Google Drive."

""In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," Liberman wrote me. "In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'""

"We received a couple of requests from teachers asking for Google Drive add-ons to use with Google Docs to create and integrate diagrams and flowcharts. The first tool that came to mind is Gliffy for we have reviewed it here a couple of times but then we did a further search in Google Drive app store and picked two more to add to this list. For those of you looking for apps to create concept and mind maps in Google Drive, this selection is a good place to start with."

"When you buy or transfer a domain name, you'll get free private registration so your personal information isn't publicized, email forwarding and up to 100 email aliases, website forwarding, and use of Google's DNS servers so your domain name will connect quickly to your site. The domain management tools will let you configure the domain's resource records, add name servers, lock the domain, add up to 100 sub-domains and more. If you want to quickly build a website, Google Domains will also connect your domain to site builders such as Shopify and Weebly."

"Facebook "likes" are being added to webpages even if a user has not clicked a like button, or even visited the page in question, the company has admitted. A US security researcher found that simply sending a web address to a friend using Facebook's private messaging function would add two likes to that page. "

YouTube videos may soon be getting a little more interactive. There's now a page on the YouTube website describing a feature called "Video Questions Editor Beta," which was spotted by the Dutch tech site WebSonic.nl. The page itself is pretty bare-bones, but it describes the feature as a way for "multiple questions to be displayed on top of your video during playback that a viewer can answer." So video producers can add an interactive element to their content - imagine adding little quizzes to an educational video or introducing product questions to a video ad.

"Author Steven Rosenbaum writes in Curation Nation: "When you add a human editorial layer, a curational perspective that organizes gathered content and community participation, you get real results.""

the company says it's gaining momentum: Google announced today that 500 million people have created profiles, 235 million people have used at least one of its features (like +1'ing a Web page), and 135 million visit plus.google.com monthly. (That's up from 100 million in September.)

To add the Galaxy Camera to a Share Everything Plan, you can even upgrade for a special price of $5. AT&T recently started carrying the device for $499 in November. The camera has a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor with 21x zoom. But when you flip that bad boy over, you won't see a little 2-inch LCD. Instead, you'll be met with the familiar Android homescreen (Jelly Bean, no less), on a 4.8-inch 720p SLCD display.

"To the catalog of financial stresses on higher education-the imminent explosion in online learning, cutbacks in state aid and weak endowments-you can add one more: tapped-out parents."

Snapchat is a new way to share moments with friends. Snap an ugly selfie or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap disappears. The image might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends, and not just a pretty picture.

"Schools are buying tablets with a reckless ferocity. There are pronouncements of how iPads will revolutionize or transform education, without a coherent vision of what that might look like or a single example rooted in practice. The iPad provides an illusion of modernity with no real challenge to the nature of schooling-a win-win proposition unless you're a child. Add hysterical Web filtering, social media bans, and locked-down devices incapable of installing software, and the tablet becomes a tool of compliance, not empowerment. Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don't. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use."

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"Google announced that you can now add up to 15 people to a Google+ Hangout if you are business, government or school using Google Apps with Google+."

This is great I wanted to use it for the class I am teaching but we have 14 students. Now I can use it... Thanks for up-date.

Creating a workable Minority Report-like screen isn't very hard but what about an entire room or building that responds to touch, voice, and movement? Now that's hard. That, however, is the goal of OpenArch, a project by designer Ion Cuervas-Mons that uses projectors, motion sensors, and light to create interactive spaces.

"An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that's not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold's book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of "supercollaborators," as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who's interviewed in the book."

This is true for digital natives...my grandson is always on- line playing games with people he has never seen in person. I am not quite there yet! I still like to make eye contact -:)

But even though you're likely built for this kind of intense regime, you'll be better served if you learn how to harness your distracted tendencies. Here are three tips that I've learned to help you along:

"Community Maps Create a community or educational map and share it with other users. Any registered user can add map points to it."

"Jeannette M. Wing actually phrases it, "computational thinking" in her article on the subject, and writes that "Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability.""

"pick a video, add your magical touch and track your students' understanding"