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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Every time Apple makes an announcement about, well, anything… the rumors start to swirl. The tech company’s latest announcement that it will be delaying shipments of the white version of the iPhone 4 until an unspecified date later in 2010 has many people wondering if …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …