Monthly Archives: July 2010

How To Turn Your Handwriting Into A Font

Remember how great your handwriting and cursive was during grade school when you spent hours each day writing, practicing penmanship, and actually using a pen and paper? Times have changed and more and more communication is done using a keyboard instead of a pen or …

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Why School Websites Suck.

Ever been to a school website trying to find the mailing address of it… only to find yourself assaulted with racially diverse pictures, a virtual tour, and a lot of marketing language? As someone on the inside of education and web design, this has frustrated …

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What Can A PLN Do For You?

I’d first like to acknowledge UPS for this great slogan. Secondly, I would like to express my humble thanks to my personal learning network. Last Monday I lost my job due to budget constraints at my former charter school. It was both shocking and humbling. I …

Teaching Tool Upgrade: Google Earth Now Shows Live Weather

Google just can’t seem to take a day off. Google Earth, one of the most popular online tools in the classroom, now shows live weather. It does so by displaying preset animations over targeted areas. In other words, it looks like it’s raining over your …

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Why Teachers Must Know Their Students [VIDEO]

If you teach a class of just a handful of students (where the heck do you work!?) then you might not be able to relate to this video. However, if you are like the vast majority of teachers and are in charge of a large …

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How To Use Facebook Questions In The Classroom

The gloves are off. Facebook is taking aim at Yahoo! Answers, Quora and Mahalo with its latest feature. Facebook Questions will allow users to get crowdsourced answers to almost any question from the 500 million-strong Facebook community. Facebook Questions gives users the opportunity to ask …

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Google Makes Premium Apps Free For Teachers

What do Alex Trebek, teachers and Googlers have in common? Last week, these individuals and groups all came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to celebrate exploration and learning. Google hosted its first Geo Teachers Institute, an intensive two-day workshop in which 150 …

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A Chilling Must-Read For Social Media Users.

I understand the risks involved with social media. I get that putting more information about yourself out on the web can cause some of the crazier people to cyberstalk you or even confront you. In a chilling story, that’s just what happened to Shea Silvia …

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White iPhones Delayed Again, Possibly For Antenna Fix

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A Terrible Name For A School.

Your favorite time-wasting site has not failed you. The inimitable Failblog has shared with the world one of the worst names I’ve ever seen for a school. It’s nothing offensive or even repulsive…it’s just…well…you’re not even reading this text right now anyway. You’re staring at …

Should Teachers Track Students Via Their Smart Phones?

If your students like to play hooky, wander off, or just not show up to school…would you try to find them? What if it were very easy to find out where a student is depending on their phone’s location? As you know, students are very …

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How To Blog By Calling Your Website

It’s happened to all of us. The night starts off innocently enough with a little gin and tonic, maybe a mojito, then next thing you know you’re doing tequila shots with the bartender and the girl from Brazil and you find yourself thinking it would be a treMENdous idea …

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The EdTech Canon: 7 Must-Have Resources For Users, Producers, and Teachers

Studying Web culture and learning, I feel like I’m on the cusp of something big, and futuristic and important.  It’s like the space race of the 1950s, only instead of looking to outer space, celestial bodies, and distant life forms, we are peering into cyberspace, …

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Coming Soon To Your Twitter Stream: Pictures, Videos, and More!

Your Twitter stream might soon look a bit more like Facebook. Last night, Twitter temporarily rolled out a new setting called “Tweet Media,” an option that allows you to decide whether to include photos or videos from everyone on Twitter, or just the people you’re …

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How To Use Apple's New Magic Trackpad In The Classroom

This may be the first time you’ve heard of the newest product coming out of Cupertino and you might be asking yourself ‘what the heck is a Magic Trackpad? Let me Google that.’ Hold that search! Here’s the details direct from Apple’s site: The new …

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Introducing Socially Learning

You may have noticed the more infrequent updating of EduDemic and EduDatum over the past week or two. That’s because I have been tinkering away with a new way to grow your PLN. It’s a new educational social network that’s free, easy to use like …

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Are E-Books Ever Going To Beat Printed Books?

Amazon announced that its June 2010 Kindle e-book sales nearly doubled its hardcover book sales (180% higher). While many of those e-books were self-published books for as low as $1 (and even though traditional paperbacks are still selling wildly), it looks more and more like …

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How Twitter Helps Researchers Visualize The Moods Of Americans

Are your students cranky during the afternoon? They might not be alone. According to a new study by a group of researchers at Northeastern University and Harvard, people seem to be in the worst moods of the day during the afternoon. How did they figure …

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Facebook In 2004: The Harvard Crimson’s First Article

In honor of Facebook welcoming its 500 millionth user today, we thought it would be fun to see how the Harvard Crimson, the university’s leading newspaper, portrayed TheFacebook during its infancy. It’s well-known that Facebook started at Harvard in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room… but do …

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How To Efficiently And Elegantly Browse Your Social Networks

Tired of the way Twitter and Facebook look? While there are a host of add-ons, plug-ins, and other tweaks you can make, it’s hard to get it just right. Flipboard, a new iPad application, has leveraged many of the popular social network APIs and rebuilt …

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The 100 Best (And Free) Online Learning Tools

The 100 Best (And Free) Online Learning Tools

We’re always excited to find the next best thing. But how does one actually find this supposed next best thing? Let EduDemic and it’s sister site EduDatum do the work for you! For example, ever wanted to spend zero dollars but have some of the …

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The Ultimate Guide To Understanding Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is quickly affecting more and more students as they progress through school. While there is very little information suggesting the trend will get better, it can help to understand the problem. We’ve compiled some of the best infographics that help explain the numbers …

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How To Predict Who Will Follow You On Twitter And When

While we thoroughly acknowledge that using Twitter should not be about gaining followers, it’s certainly fun to see that more and more people are enjoying what you’re saying and therefore following you. Aside from this giant caveat, we wanted to let our loyal readers in …

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How The New Google Images Redesign Can Help Students

Never wanting to take a break or stop reinventing the wheel, Google has just unveiled the new design for Google Images. It gets ride of a lot of the text, urls, and other miscellaneous data and focuses instead on making image search a more visual …

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The No-Duh Solution To iPhone 4's Antenna Problem

Leave it to the Internet to clean up Apple’s messes. A user on Etsy is gaining some real traction today after people started noticing Antennaid’s solution to the iPhone 4 antenna problem. The solution? Simply place a band-aid like sticker over the area that messes …

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No More Final Exams At Harvard: Is Your School Next?

According to Harvard Magazine, final exams are “going the way of the dodo.” Last spring, a mere 23 percent of the school’s 1,137 undergraduate courses gave exams, the magazine reports. And a new faculty vote dictates that a professor must actively decide whether or not …

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500 Facebook Facts You May Not Know

Facebook will be welcoming its 500 millionth user this week, making it the most successful and largest social network worldwide.  Does this make Facebook too big to fail? Could the social network soon go public and just become another corporate behemoth swallowing up start-ups and …

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What You Should Know About The Millenial Generation [INFOGRAPHIC]

Want to know more about current college students and recent grads? Do they like to use Twitter? Do they worry about having a successful marriage or being famous? The answers might surprise you. If you were born between 1977 and 1998, you’re a part of …

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3 Big Ways Foursquare Should Be Incorporated Into Search Results

Whether you’re an avid Foursquare checker-inner or simply know of the product (it allows people to gain points and other virtual prizes by checking into almost location using a smartphone), you might want to be careful about where you check in. That’s because Foursquare is …

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Is This The Ultimate Advertisement For Libraries?

You’ve probably heard of the popular Old Spice Guy commercials that have made waves over the past couple of weeks. Just as the sun rises every day, there is sure to be parodies made. One parody from Urlesque is actually quite good. It’s a promotion …

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