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!
Is it Friday already? No, sadly it is not yet. I’m sharing a FaithPost a couple of days early as I want to offer this wonderful resource now, so that you could possibly use it before or during Holy Week.
The good Paulist Fathers who create the awesome, newly redesigned, young-adult site Busted Halo, have put together a quite powerful set of videos following the Stations of the Cross. Each video uses just text and music to tell the story and interpret the meaning of each of the fourteen traditional moments in Christ’s Passion. Here’s the fourth station, which I find particularly moving and insightful:
There’s a lot I like about these videos. But two aspects are particularly meaningful. First, the overarching theme of this version of the Way of the Cross is the Kingdom of God. This central vision of Jesus’ ministry is at the heart of the gospel and thus something which we must emphasize time and again to those to whom we minister.
I also find the simple music accompanying the words on the screen provocative, compelling and deeply moving. The piano melody used with the stations in which Jesus Meets His Mother, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus and Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem is one I find haunting and well-matched to the emotions of these encounters.
I’m using these videos in our chapel as a prayer service with all five of my classes today. It has worked better with my one sophomore class than my two freshmen ones. I think the greater maturity and developing wisdom in the older students is the main difference.
I’ve created this presentation to use with the videos. It should be pretty self-explanatory – show the slide introducing a station, play the video and then prayerfully read the supporting slide while giving the viewers/participants a few moments to reflect.
A couple of things you may wonder about the presentation: The photos of the crosses were ones that I took while visiting Christ in the Desert Monastery in northern New Mexico a few years ago. And the colors of the background of the slides is meant to represent the transition and transformation of this time in Lent, to Holy Week and then to Easter.
I hope you find this Busted Halo Stations of the Cross as meaningful and useful as I do. The video below will link you to the playlist of all the fourteen stations.
May you have a blessed Fifth Tuesday of Lent and a good rest of the week.
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:
It’s hard to believe that Lent is upon us so quickly this year. Next year, Ash Wednesday will be nearly three weeks later – March 1, 2017! How will you Fast, Pray & Give this year.
Here’s a few resources I’m looking at this year:
USCCB – “Lent 2016: 40 Days of Mercy
Catholic Relief Services Rice Bowl – I especially like their weekly, meatless recipes from around the world. Hopefully they will again have videos of Fr. Leo demonstrating each one.
Loyola Press Lenten Resources especially their Online Lenten Retreats & Prayers
Creighton University On-Line Ministries: Praying Lent – I highly recommend this audio retreat presented by the wise Fr. Larry Gillick, S.J.
Other Jesuit Lenten resources can be found at Thinking Faith and the audio-focused Pray As You Go – both from the U.K.
Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Lenten Resources (includes a link to sign up for his daily Lenten reflection emails.)
As of today (Monday), Busted Halo hasn’t posted their popular Lent calendar yet. They have a few Lenten themed articles as well as this excellent Ash Wednesday in Two Minutes video:
Last year for both Lent and Advent I found the resources offered by the Society of St. John the Evangelist to be faith and thought provoking. This year’s theme, which encompasses daily videos, emails and a workbook is entitled: Growing a Rule of Life. It begins with this introductory video by one of the wise brothers:
And it even has a component for use with youth.
In light of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking celebration of God’s Creation, “Laudato Si” how about connecting your Lenten fasting to activities which care for creation. A number of faith organizations offer Lenten calendars with suggestions for each day:
Sisters of St. Joseph Carbon Fast
Michigan Interfaith Power & Light
Carbon Fast – Anglican Communion
More extensive “carbon fast” programs, including daily emails and message boards, are offered by MACUCC and EcoChurch Southwest (U.K.)
Shifting gears to focus on apps, Give Us This Day is offering a free trial of their app featuring the day’s morning & evening prayers as well as the daily mass.
Finally, props to a great blog site – Catholic Apptitude and their listing of apps and related resources for Lent.
It’s Sunday night and I remember it well…1989… 27 years ago…I’m a sophomore at the University of San Francisco…8:59 pm on a Sunday…I bolt up from the cruddy couch in the dorm TV lounge and head for the exit…”The Simpsons,” in it’s first season, has just ended…I enter the flow of fellow students heading to the near-by, on-campus St. Ignatius Church…So many of us enter, post-Simpsons, that they’ve taken to delaying the start of the 9:00 pm mass until about 9:10 as the pews are mostly empty at 9 and much fuller by 9:10 — all due to “The Simpsons”
If you’re a fan of this show, you MUST check out this search engine I learned about from io9. It’s called the Frinkiac and the memes you can easily create (see above) are a blast!
Have fun wasting time and busting up as you do it….
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!
Unlike last Friday, my midterms are finally at the copy machine, so I have a moment to share a truly astounding Friday FunLink video.
As I’ve posted previously, I’m a big Star Wars fan. I’m counting down the days until a week from today when finally, finally, finally I can see Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.”
Until then, I need to settle for this extremely well-done video which combines something I really like with someone I really don’t. So, thanks to Slate, take a 7 minute break to refresh your memory about Star Wars IV, V, and VI and also about some of the always interesting things The Donald has said. Be sure to watch while in a place where you can laugh out loud!
And be sure to watch until the end (or just forward to there) as the Trumpization of the final scene of Return of the Jedi is priceless – and it showcases the last sequential image we saw in the Star Wars universe.
