English: Diagram of technology-empowered professional development for teachers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My friend and fellow ed tech blogger Adam Bellow has relaunched his start-up companyeduClipper. Some of you may remember that Adam launched a private beta of the service last year. Well after a big investment from some venture capital firms and ten months of testing and revising features eduClipper is better than ever. In fact, I think it’s what teachers wish Pinterest could be. Last week Adam and I spent an hour talking about the new eduClipper in it’s current state and where it is going in the future. Let’s take a look at what will make eduClipper a very popular service amongst educators.
The thing that is obvious when you visit eduClipper is that it is a visual bookmarking tool. You can use the eduClipper bookmarklet to add “clips” (bookmarks) to your eduClipper boards. But eduClipper is much more than a visual bookmarking service. You can add PowerPoint, PDF, and image files to your boards. You can also add links to videos to your boards. You can play the videos without leaving your eduClipper board. And those of us who have Google Drive embedded into our professional lives will be happy to know that we can add Google Drive files to our eduClipper boards.
In 2018 we are all living in a world where almost everything is becoming connected, whether it’s the power grid, network, phone system, our cars, or the appliances that heat our home or chill our food. As this Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate. This growing class of cloud-connected devices – 9 billion of which ship every year – run tiny MCU chips that will power everything from kitchen appliances and toys to industrial equipment on factory floors. This next wave of connected devices is in increasingly intelligent and connected. They will improve daily life in countless ways, but if they’re not secure, they will make people, communities and countries vulnerable to attack in more ways than ever before.
As s result of this the Threat and security risks expand exponentially. At this year RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced new offerings to take security more squarely to where it needs to go and where it has not effectively gone before – the edge.
The Azure Sphere Services are a new services and features that will better harden not only our intelligent cloud but also the billions of connected devices that live on its edge.
I was crate digging at my local used vinyl emporium a little while ago and came across some sound effects records from the early ‘60s. Nothing amazing, until I checked the track list and noticed “Sounds of Football Match — ‘Block that Kick!’”
If you’re a Beatles fan like me, you’ll know what I suspected and then found to be true: I was holding the source of not just one, but several of the sound effects used in “Revolution 9” as well as the bird effects heard on “Across the Universe” and “Blackbird.” Apparently this must have been a popular disc at Abbey Road.
Now I mention this as a preamble to this amazing website by the BBC, in which they’ve opened their archive of 16,000 (technically 16,016) sound effects, many of which have surely been used over and over on various radio plays. (For the Americans out there, yes, BBC Radio still produces radio plays!)
Digital immigrants(Ed. – hate that description) are still trying to come to grips with all the digital innovations that are unfolding in today’s world. And even for those who have succeeded in making the digital transition, they still have an urge for the old days of pen and paper practices. That is probably why even with the prevalence of touch screen devices, some people still prefer to use a stylus when working on their tablets. While stylus does satisfy the craving for holding a pen in your hand, it still does not function as expected.
English: Apple iPad Event (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So if you are one of those people who like to use their fingers to take notes on iPad, the list below will be of great help to you. I have curated several useful apps that will allow you to experiment with your handwriting right on your iPad screen.
English: The Google search homepage, viewed in Google Chrome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.
Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)
Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.
Hatched by Google Creative Lab creative technologist Jason Striegel, designer Jeff Baxter, and a small team in New York, Coder offers a stepping stone for people interested in building for the web by converting cheap Raspberry Pi mini-computers into personal web servers through a stripped-back web-based development environment.
Google’s pitching Coder at an education audience, a potential sweet spot for Raspberry Pi given its $35 price tag and one Google has focused on previously, gifting 15,000 of the devices to UK schools earlier this year. Raspberry Pi supporters in the UK have also been urging schools to use the devices to spur interest in coding, hacking and building.
Roughly every ten years there’s a shift to a new computing paradigm. The computer hardware and process optimization of the 80’s gave way to the Microsoft-dominated software and productivity of the 90s. Google-dominated web-based information retrieval of the 00s yielded to the Apple–Android mobile duopoly and the warehouse of apps paradigm of the 10’s.
The maturity of the web, intelligent cloud computing, advances in AI and the mobility of our digital experiences are setting the stage for the next shift to more ambient computing via the Internet of Things. By 2020 the number of connected devices is expected to triple to 34 billion (with a global human population of 7.5 billion).
Announcing the Windows Azure for Research LinkedIn discussion group!
The group will serve as an opportunity to connect and engage with researchers and domain experts to drive awareness of Microsoft Research and Windows Azure for Research. We’d like for you to be part of the community and discussions.
What is the Windows Azure for Research initiative?
This is a program designed to help the research community use cloud computing to handle the challenges of data-intensive science. The culmination of more than three years of experimentation with using Windows Azure for scientific research, the Windows Azure for Research Initiative will help scientists accelerate the speed and dissemination of scientific discoveries.
The Windows family tree. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Windows Azure for Research project facilitates and accelerates scholarly and scientific research by enabling researchers to use the power of Windows Azure to perform big data computations in the cloud.
Windows Azure Research Award Program
Microsoft Research is soliciting proposals for the use of Windows Azure in research. We welcome research proposals from any branch of scholarly activity. To qualify, applicants must be affiliated with an academic institution or non-profit research laboratory. In addition to individual investigator projects, we are interested in projects that will support access to services and data of value to a collaboration or community. Winning proposals will be awarded large allocations of Windows Azure storage and compute resources for a period of one year.
We will periodically announce additional special-opportunity RFPs on specific cloud research topics. These topics will include community research data services, streaming instrument data to the cloud, machine learning in the cloud, large-scale image analysis, environmental science, astronomy, genomics, and urban science.
Your proposal should not exceed three pages in length. It should include resource requirement estimates (number of core, storage requirements, and so forth) for your project.
The official online color is: #A4C639 . 한국어: 공식 온라인 색은: #A4C639 . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Android has overtaken Apple in the world of apps. Look for the same thing to potentially happen in the near future as well. You can’t talk about tablets in education, smartphones in the classroom, or really education technology in general without mentioning Android.
Whichever platform you prefer, it’s worth always knowing what’s out there. Don’t wall yourself into an Apple-only or Android-only environment. It’s hard to switch, for sure.
But it’s worth knowing what the competition is doing.
Remember, you are probably not an Apple or Google employee. You aren’t obligated to use one operating system over another. Both of the leading OSes are so darn hard to switch out of, however, that it can seem like an insurmountable task. The mere thought of having to re-purchase all your apps for a different platform is enough to make most never even consider switching.
So if you’re an Android user or perhaps an Apple user looking to stay in the know about education apps for Android, check out this useful list and stay informed.
Tony Gurney 