🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄
From School plus I have a new favorite quote for today:
“When Gutenberg invented the printing press, we didn’t have Europe plus books. Instead we had a whole new Europe.”
When adding technology, you want a whole new school, not just school plus technology. Go over and read George Coursos’ full post, he’s hit it out of the park yet again!
Last night we stayed at a Holiday Inn Express which offers a continental breakfast. My 9 year old daughter was fascinated with the automatic pancake maker.
Simple as can be, press OK and less than a minute later a pancake pops out. I was curious. What if I wanted more than one? As the maker worked its magic, I noticed it said Making pancake 01 of 01. Ok, so it must be possible.
Examining the front of the device made it apparent that the aluminum was covering up something. After I waited for the Holiday Inn Express employee to leave, I pulled on the cover, revealing a control panel with a number pad. I hit 3 and OK and the pancake maker came to life, working on pancake 01 of 03. Very cool. The 9 year old was, in her words, a little impressed.
TLDR; The 5S.
If you didn’t know, two new iPhones were released on the 20th to join the 4S. Since Apple has three iPhones, you may be wondering what’s the difference, which one should I get. Here’s what I think of the three models.
This phone isn’t worth it even when given away for free with a two year contract. The technology is already two years old, which means that by the end of your contract it will be four years old, an eternity. How many people do you see walking around with an iPhone 3GS? And to add insult to injury, it only comes with 8GB.
I’ve seen reviews where the writer raves on how good the plastic feels. It doesn’t feel good, it feels cheap and plasticy. The technology is already a year behind, and the price difference of $100 isn’t enough to justify buying the 5C. (Over two years, that $100 difference is only $4.16 a month). It doesn’t have the better camera of the 5S, or the 64-bit processor.
This is the phone with all the goodies. My usual recommendation when shopping for a smartphone is to buy the best phone they have. The out of pocket expenses is minuscule compared to the amount you are going to spend on your cell phone plan over the next two years. And you want to get your money’s worth from your cellphone plan, don’t you? The capabilities of the 5S make it easy to recommend. Another advantage is that in two years when your plan is up and you’re ready to buy a new phone you’ll be able to 2 to 4 hundred (depending on the color and size) out of the phone on eBay.
It’s really easy to recommend paying the $199-$399 for the iPhone 5S. In two years you’ll still be able to get that amount for it on eBay for your next iPhone. The 5C is… I don’t know why Apple released it. And an 8GB 4S is a joke. If you can only afford a free phone, buy the 5S, sell it on eBay for $600 and use the proceeds to buy a $250 4S. You’ll make $350 out of the process and have a 4S with at least 16GB of space.
…they slowly uncovered the life of a man who not only oversaw the liberated Dachau but also found himself a participant in an uncommon number of consequential events throughout Massachusetts and U.S. history. In a way Delaney couldn’t have imagined when he first popped open the suitcase that day, Joyce would turn out to be something akin to Boston’s own Forrest Gump, a perfect set of eyes through which to visit America’s past.
What an amazing find and a great way to engage the students!
Playing Starcraft 2 Might Make You Smarter
Playing Starcraft, according to the study, “stresses rapid and simultaneous maintenance, assessment, and coordination between multiple information and action sources was sufficient to affect change.” The result of playing real-time strategy games such as Starcraft is “an underlying dimension of cognitive flexibility” across several laboratory tests.
Now maybe I’ll have an excuse to buy Starcraft 2 instead of just playing Starcraft 1
Do you want to check out Linux on your current machine safely, leaving your current set up untouched? Virtualization allows you to do this using VirtualBox. We are investigating this method to integrate BYOD with our 1 to 1 program. Wikihow has a nice write up on how to install Ubuntu on VirtualBox. Keep in mind that you want to have at least 2GB of memory (4 would be better) and 10-20GB of disk space free.
Once you have it set up, play around with Ubuntu and see what all the fuss is about!
Over at Reddit there is a screenshot that shows Apple giving the users of older devices the ability to install the last compatible version of an app for their current OS.
Hopefully this will continue, it’s very frustrating on my original iPod touch to not be able to find any apps that install on iOS 3.1.3.
Taking control of your notifications is nice, but sometimes you want to be able to customize alerts. For iOS there are apps such as Boxcar, Pushover, and App Notifications. These apps are nice and do the job, but they require a little more setup and/or they cost. As I was working on my iPhone for a replacement, I realized that the built in email app can have different notification types for each email account (such as sound, vibration, etc). So I started to play around, and set up a different Yahoo! account to use for notifications on my phone. My email accounts are set to silent, except for this new Yahoo! account and my VIP list. Now when I want to be notified right away, I use this email account. Under GMail I filter emails from various accounts and forward them to my new email account. As soon as I get them, I get a new notification.
This convoluted mess could be done with the VIP list feature of iOS, but I wanted to separate my VIPs from other notifications.
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
Our incoming kindergarteners will be facing this world by the time they are 25.
