Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • iPads for all

    A School’s iPad Initiative Brings Optimism And Skepticism

    One of California’s poorest school districts, the Coachella Valley Unified southeast of Los Angeles, is currently rolling out iPads to every student, pre-kindergarten through high school. It’s an ambitious effort that administrators and parents hope will transform how kids learn, boost achievement and narrow the digital divide with wealthier districts.

    But, as with tablet efforts across the country, this one faces skeptics and obstacles. Some wonder if its projected benefits are being grossly oversold.

    Everytime I read one of these articles, the emphasis seems to dwell on the device. It’s as if there exists the perfect device and every district that picks something different is doing it wrong.

    Concentrate on what you can do with what you have. The best camera is the one you have with you, just like it is with you and your students.

  • Tweetbot 3 is one step forward, two steps back

    Tapbots this week released Tweetbot 3, their iOS 7 update to Tweetbot. Unfortunately, they changed one of the best features of Tweetbot. Lists were treated as a first class citizen. You could replace your Timeline with any of your lists with two taps. Now they have moved lists to one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen and made cumbersome to work with lists.

    I like a lot of the changes, but I have re-installed The older version of Tweetbot and have switched back to it. If you heavily use lists I’d be hesitant to upgrade. I don’t mind paying the price for the newer version, except I don’t expect to lose features.

  • How I fixed my Chrome momentary freezing problem

    For the past couple of months, my main Chrome profile has been frustrating me with its “freezing” everytime the Chrome window was activated. What I mean by this, is that when I clicked on the Chrome window with the troublesome profile, Chrome would freeze/pause for 5-10 seconds. This behavior persisted no matter what platform I used with Chrome.

    Investigating my issue, I would disable every extension, yet the problem continued. I couldn’t find anything online about my particular problem. When logging into the profile for the first time, the freeze wouldn’t happen until everything was synced. It was getting time to just delete that entire profile from Google and start anew. I didn’t want to do that. Finally, as I was looking through the settings in Chrome, I noticed the link to manage my synced data in the Google dashboard. Upon clicking on the link, I noticed I had over 16,000 bookmarks in Chrome being synced! Apparently, in the past, I had used the Delicious extension to sync my Delicious bookmarks with Chrome. What had happened was that it had duplicated all my bookmarks several times. As soon as I deleted the errant folders of Delicous bookmarks, my Chrome profile stopped freezing!!

  • Apple just killed the hackintosh

    Apple announced yesterday at their event that the newest version of OS X, version 10.9 (Mavericks), will be free to all Macintosh computers that can run it. This is pretty amazing, we can finally keep all of our Macs on the same OS instead of us currently supporting three different versions.

    But for hackintosh users, it means that there is no longer a way to purchase a legal copy of OS X. A hackintosh is a computer that is assembled out of parts that can be made to run OS X. It’s a way to get a Mac without paying for a Mac. A lot of users of hackintosh like the challenge, like OS X, but for the most part Apple doesn’t offer a hardware configuration for them. That ends now for those that try to stay as legal as possible, although a hackintosh was never quite legal. The OS X terms of service require OS X to be used on Apple labeled computers, which means even if you buy a copy it’s still not quite legal.

    Although this is probably not what Apple had in mind, it is the end of an era.

  • #OhioITSCO Leadership Symposium – Teach Like a Hacker

    Why hack?

    Teach like a hacker is the epitome of “work smarter, not harder”. Figure out clever solutions to tough problems.

    Coding

    Examples in the classroom

    Math

    Students can write programs to solve the type of problems being studied in Math. For example, write a program in your favorite language (spreadsheet, Ruby, Python, etc.) that can add fractions.

    English Language Arts and Social Studies

    Use interactive fiction to put your students into the mindset characters in literature or in history. Inklewriter can be used as a starting point, advanced students can move to Inform. Both can be published on the web for others to play. (Inform can be hosted in Google Drive.)

    Science

    For this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the three scientests used computers to model molecules and reactions.

    As a news release explained it, “Chemists used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks,” but “today the modeling is carried out in computers,” thanks in part to work done in the 1970s by the three new laureates.

    A lot of modeling of processes can now happen in the computer, and the students can modify the model to see what happens.

  • Follow and backchannel the Apple event today

    I’ve set up an IRC bot to feed MacRumorsLive Twitter account into the #eduk8me IRC channel on Freenode. You can use the web client or any IRC client to connect to the #eduk8me channel on Freenode.

    (I’m at the Ohio ITSCO Leadership Symposium, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to join. 🙁 )

  • Quantum computing and Minecraft

    Google Releases qCraft Mod For Minecraft So Kids Can Explore Quantum Computing

    Google recognizes the potential here well, and wanted to add quantum physics into the mix. Thus, the ‘qCraft’ mod was born, one that adds new blocks that add an entirely new mechanic to the game, such as quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer dependency.

    The company admits that this isn’t a “perfect scientific simulation”, but there’s such thing as “good enough” here. The goal is to get kids and others interested in quantum physics, and judging from a quick demo, it looks to have major potential.

    Very cool!

  • From the, well duh department

    Technology Will Not Replace Teachers

    As much innovation as the iPad may bring to the classroom, it’s not going to replace a teacher anytime soon. In fact, the influx of technology like iPads means there is a greater need for teachers. We need teachers who are part early adopter, part integrator, and part mad scientist. The modern teacher must be willing to take chances and able to figure out how not just how technology works, but how it works for each student, and where its use is most appropriate.

    Mad scientist indeed!

  • Get voice search on your older iOS devices (iPad 1, iPhone 4, iPod Touch, etc.) with Google Search

    Do you have a iOS device that doesn’t have Siri? Are you feeling lonely and would like to talk to your device? Maybe Google Search is what you need.

    Once you install it, you can ask Google questions, like “Is it going to rain tonight?” or “What time do the buckeyes play today?”. It’s not all the automation that Siri does, but it’s pretty nice.

    (Google Chrome also supports dictation in the app)

  • More on libraries and their future

    Surprise! It’s the Golden Age of Libraries

    Zachary Loeb (who writes as the Luddbrarian on the blog librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com) notes that “although college students have a huge amount of information available to them, this does not automatically mean that they have acquired all of the information literacy necessary to really make sense of this mass amount of information. As a result the library staff becomes an increasingly important resource for students wading through the information glut, especially as library staff are often available to students in numerous ways (in person, e-mail, chat, by phone).” This is particularly true for adult learners who return to higher education after many years away from the classroom and who often find virtual research daunting.

    Libraries aren’t going anywhere, but much like the saying “let’s videotape that” now meaning to digitally record video, “let’s go to the library” will mean something different.