Where educational technology and innovative pedagogy merge.
If you’ve been putting off an update to the most recent iOS for your iPad or iPhone – you need to read this article from ZD Net and then update ASAP.
This sounds like a nasty thing which can fry your iDevice, so don’t delay – update today!
Another week rolls by. It’s hard to believe that a fortnight from today is Good Friday. March often drags by, but this year it and Lent are zipping by. The relative lack of winter here in Ohio surely helps!
Last weekend I posted about some podcasts that I like and an outstanding way to listen to them on an Android device (Pocket Cast). Today, I share a Catholic daily podcast which helps my faith to grow and deepen. It has its own iOS and Android apps too (see below about Android.)
The site is “Pray as You Go” and it’s created by the Jesuits in Britain who also create the equally excellent “Thinking Faith” and “Sacred Space”
I won’t spend time and space here trying to “sell” you on “Pray as You Go.” I will say that I get much from the short (12 min or less) combination of music, the day’s scripture (read twice in lectio divina style), brief commentary, reflection questions and an invitation for prayer.
I do recommend that you listen to it directly through the website or via a general podcasting app like Pocket Cast. “Pray As You Go” has an expanded presence on Soundcloud which has a pretty good Android app. It appears that there’s content there which isn’t elsewhere, such as this series of talks and poems by the great Gerard Manly Hopkins, S.J.
About the Android “Pray as You Go” app – I’d avoid it for now. It has an issue which doesn’t allow you to stream or download a day’s content until well after it has passed. I thought this might be just an issue on my device, so I emailed them. Turns, out they are aware of this universal problem and are working to fix it in a future release.
Until then, I hope you’ll use one of these many means listed above to pray as you go — to work, on a walk, to the store, wherever!
It’s another Sunday night and if you’re like me – YOU DON’T HAVE SCHOOL TOMORROW! Sorry to “shout” there, but it’s always nice to enjoy a Sunday night without the preoccupation of having to prepare to teach on Monday morning.
Rather than just offer one funny or thought-provoking Sun(Fun)day Night link, I’m offering a whole list of them. I’ve been saving these up and now seems like as good a time as any to share them here.
Enjoy these links and take a look into the crystal ball to see the future of technology:
“Mechanical Trees Become ‘Power Plants’ When They Sway in the Breeze”
“3D Touch Opens a New Dimension of User Interaction”
“Battery Research Claims 10x Gain”
“This Samsung Patent Lets Smartwatches Recognize You by Your Veins”
“Insane Ways of Making Energy You May Not Know”
“The Mobile Phone of the Future Will Be Planted in Your Head”
“Dissolvable Devices Keep Tabs on The Brain”
“Autonomous Robots are Changing the Way We Build and Move Products Around the World”
“Hop, Skip, Drive: Uber, But For Kids”
“Scientists Can Now Predict Intelligence From Brain Activity”
“Fiction’s Newest Frontier: Literary Geocaching”
“Wearable Sensors Could Translate Sign Language Into English”
“New Foam Batteries Promise Fast Charging, Higher Capacity”
“Artificially Intelligent Software is Replacing the Textbook and Reshaping American Education”
“How Your Device Knows Your Life Through Images”
“Meet Kangaroo: A $99 Windows 10 Desktop PC as Small as a Smartphone”
“Do Robots Need a Human-Like Sense of Touch”
“This Guy Wants Us to Commute in Autonomous On-Demand Pods”
“Why Hearables May Be the Next Big Thing in Tech”
“Mind Controlled Robot Suits Help the Paralyzed Move Again”
“Salt-Based Batteries Could Make Your Next Mobile Device Cheaper and Greener”
“7 Unexpected Virtual Reality Use Cases”
“Microsoft’s 2016 Predictions: Expect the Year of Machine Aided Wit”
“Yahoo Labs Develops Biometric Authentication Method for Touchscreens”
“2016 Will Be the Year Wearables Disappear”
“Google Testing a Feature to Eliminate the Password”
“Future of Messaging Apps Spells the End of Google as We Know It”
“OrCam’s MyMe Wearable Will Watch and Decode the World For You”
In place of the usual Friday FunLink and since it’s been exactly a month since I’ve offered a Stuff You Should Know post, I’m shifting gears today.
A short while ago I saw an interesting article today in the Washington Post entitled “The Radical Plan to Destroy Time Zones.” It fits into the category of the SYSK feature because Johns Hopkins professors Hanke and Henry are seeking to implement this unification of global time as well as a permanent calendar (see above for a screen shot of it) on January 1, 2018.
The WaPo interview doesn’t quite flesh out the day to day changes that a single time would require except to observe:
While it may ultimately simplify our lives, the concept would require some big changes to the way we think about time. As the clocks would still be based around the Coordinated Universal Time (the successor to Greenwich Mean Time that runs through Southeast London) most people in the world would have to change the way they consider their schedules. In Washington, for example, that means we’d have to get used to rising around noon and eating dinner at 1 in the morning. (Okay, perhaps that’s not that big a change for some people.)
One of the first shifts would be to go completely to 24 hour time as “am” and “pm” would just be confusing. With this in place, the mind-shift would take time (pun intended) but it wouldn’t be impossible. To translate the example above, our rising time would be about 1200 (6am) with dinner time 13 hours later at 100 (7pm) and bed time 3 hours after this at 400 (10pm). Most digital watches can already be set to show 24 hour time and adding a second set of numbers to analog clocks is commonly done as well. Clocks would still run at the same rate with the only shift at 0000 UTC on 1 Jan 2018 in which every clock in the world would jump simultaneously to 0000. Back end tech work would have to be done on computer clocks, but we already showed something similar could be achieved a decade and a half ago with the Y2K fix.
As the proponents in the article note:
I (Henry) recall when my elderly mother in Canada said to me, oh, it was hot today, 30 degrees! If she could change [from measuring temperature in Fahrenheit to measuring it in Celsius], everyone can change!
Yeah, we tried that Imperial to Metric switch back in the 1970’s and early 1980’s and how did that work out for the U.S.? Yet, ambitious people with websites keep trying…
The proposal for a new calendar, dubbed the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has it’s own Wikipedia page, running example of the new time/date, and articles in Live Science and Wired dating back to the end of 2011. And since the proponents acknowledge that there isn’t any world governing body to implement these changes, this massive (but sensible) shift would have to come through a global on-line/social media campaign. So, here I am doing my part.
Two advantages that I see – no more Friday the 13th ever again and my birthday (Jan 20th) would always fall on a Friday (yes, bummer to all of those whose birthdays would forever fall on a Monday!).
And a disadvantage for some – Halloween would have to be moved to a different date as 31 October would cease to exist. This is not as hard as one might think as we already regularly do it here in Central Ohio – to the bewilderment and ridicule of even people like Stephen Colbert:
On this first day of the second month of 2016 I offer you a chance to celebrate: National Girls and Women in Sports Day; Change Your Password Day; Car Insurance Day; G.I. Joe Day; and Decorating with Candy Day by enjoying this list of “Best of 2015 Lists”
Why, you may ask, am I sharing these a month and a day after the start of 2016? A simple answer: these links were in my queue for posting by year’s end – and it never happened. Rather than just delete them and move on, I thought there is still value in looking back to find quality books, music, apps, etc from last year. Hence, this “web link clearance” today.
Besides: Do you write 2016 every time you put down the date or do you still sometimes write 2015 by mistake?
The Only 9 Apps Released in 2015 We’re Still Actually Using
Longreads Best Stories of 2015
Apple Names the Best iOS Apps of 2015
10 Most Popular Podcasts of 2015 (“How to Listen to Podcasts”)
Top Illustrated Science Books of 2015
Overdrive’s Best Books of 2015 [This is the excellent online portal for ebooks and audiobooks that both of our local library systems use)
NY Times 10 Best Books of 2015
After hearing the announcement/ad for Curiosity.com numerous times on NPR, I finally got around to checking it out and down loading the iOS app.
I’m not going to say much about it here, because I emphatically encourage you to click the link above and check it out yourself.
As a passionate learner (which hopefully every teacher is), I like the set of five interesting links it gives me every day. An example from the last few days is above. And here’s a few more:
When you click on the image, it takes you here:
Here’s one more pair of examples:
What are you waiting for? Visit Curiosity.com and get learning!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I don’t use the “Stuff You Should Know” feature lightly.
I use it for this link because it’s a pretty dramatic article about an app which sounds quite problematic.
The feature article, published the other day by the Washington Post, details this app – The After School App – which offers a location where students from more than 22,000 U.S. high schools are posting all kinds of things – all anonymously. The creators of the app are quoted in the article:
Cory Levy, 24, one of the app’s founders, said After School gives teens a chance to “express themselves without worrying about any backlash or any repercussions.” He said the app is a new way for teens to ask difficult, uncomfortable questions anonymously and to more directly address issues such as depression, how to come out as gay to one’s parents or how to navigate the daily challenges of teen life.
Levy said the product creates a much-needed alternative to Facebook and Instagram, where teens have grown up carefully curating digital identities that might not reflect their true struggles and anxieties. After School allows them to be themselves without worrying so much about what other people will think, he said.
Not surprisingly the forum has morphed into a place where cyber-bulling, suicidal pleas, and threats of violence have been posted. While these negative and even dangerous exchanges are surely done via other, conventional social media, the issue with this platform – The After School app – is that it is difficult, if not impossible for non-student adults to gain access:
After School limits its audience to teens by requiring users to verify that they attend high school through their Facebook pages and by creating restricted message boards for each high school campus. Parents and others who want to access the app would have to lie to do so, saying on Facebook that they attend the high school. Even then, parents could be stopped by an algorithm that aims to block people from posing as high school students.
Therein lies my biggest concern about this app – parents and school officials are obstructed from seeing not only what individuals are saying, but whether a school or district has active (and perhaps negative or dangerous) activity. Again, there’s many other sites where a student can complain about teachers or others at their school. But with these, there’s a transparency which permits observation and monitoring by adults. With After School, this appears to be deliberately blocked.
There’s more to this article of value and importance, so I urge you to make it a “long read” this weekend.
It’s the second day of Advent 2016 (yes, it is now The Year of Grace 2016) and here’s some resources that I’m using with my students and in my own personal prayer:
Advent in Two Minutes:
Busted Halo Advent Calendar (pictured above)
#adventword – A Global Advent Calendar – This is a cool site leveraging social media to gather images of an Advent “word of the day.”
Sign-up for Bishop Robert Barron’s daily Advent reflections
And a video from him as well:
Loyola Press has an engaging Arts & Faith set of Advent Resources while the home page for all of their Advent resources is here.
How about iOS and Android Apps to either create or access Advent calendars and other resources? Learn about these here and here.
Finally, for videos and other resources, from a more general Christian perspective, check out Advent Conspiracy
Have a blessed and meaningful Advent season!
I learned about this story during last summer, but I’ve not gotten around to writing about it until now. I’m choosing to share it tonight because guinea pigs are on my mind.
First, the sad news. Prior to this afternoon, we had two guinea pigs, Jack Black (on the right) and Teddy (left):
Teddy had been ailing for a while with weight-loss. Last Monday, the vet ran x-rays and found a large, untreatable bladder stone. As he was in noticeable pain from it, the vet gave us pain medicine for him as all we could do for him was keep him comfortable until his condition worsened.
During the week, he continued to lose weight. Today, he was in even greater pain and was making horrible “squawking” sounds. We made the agonizing decision to take Teddy back to the vet to be euthanized.
I had a few moments to hold him, take photos and then to say goodbye.
I feel quite sad about Teddy’s departure as he was a good friend to the family and his “brother” Jack. We had these pigs for more than five years and they were great companions during some tough times. We’re going to watch Jack to see if he’d benefit from getting a new friend or if he’ll be okay alone. Teddy, I’ll miss you…
The good news is that there are plenty of cute guinea pig photos and videos on the internet. Perhaps none is as unusual and funny as this one from the saintfactory channel on YouTube:
After I received this video from our great hay supplier: Small Pet Select, I did some exploring. Turns out that the owner of these guinea pigs and video producer is a young, Catholic priest. His website/blog is Saint Factory: God Wants to Make You a Saint. According to the site, Fr. Andrew was ordained in 2007 to the Diocese of Charleston, S.C. He sounds like the kind of priest and person I’d like to meet – not only because he loves his pigs (named Carmy & Claire after Carmelite and Poor Clare habit colors), but just because.
Before I sign off for the night, here’s another one of his hilarious videos:
Okay, okay…one more ridiculously cute piggy video:
It’s early on this Sunday, but I have a few fun posts in mind for today. So, I thought I’d get an early start (and I’m not quite ready to settle in to my grading/planning for the day).
Congrats and kudos to the @hartleyfootball team for winning last night and making it to the semi-finals for their division in the state of Ohio.
Coach Birchfield is exceptionally skilled at motivating his players, students and colleagues. But just in case he needs some inspiration from legendary movie coaches, here’s a great supercut of all-stars:
In case you’d like some more movie coach fun, check out the results of this recent “tournament” determining which coach is the most motivational of all time.
