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Google Glass creator says ‘fear-based’ testing regimes block technology
The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and “fear-based” testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis.
Apple IDs, the center of identification in the Apple universe, have the capability to attach multiple email addresses. By signing into appleid.apple.com you can verify additional email addresses. Once added you can use them with several Apple services, most notably, iMessages. Others can iMessage you with any of the verified email addresses.
In How Poverty Taxes the Brain researchers have found out in one particular study how much poverty affects the brain:
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.
It’s been discussed that standardized testing is just a way to show the socioeconomic status of school districts. As shown in these experiments, the cognitive ability of people under poverty is limited due to the processing of the hardships that go along with poverty. It’s not that the poor were of lower intelligence and that’s why they are in poverty, but that becoming poor means their brains have to put forth effort that it didn’t do before.
Now that I’ve switched from WordPress to Pelican I’m face with the dilemma on how to update Twitter and Facebook when I post to my blog. In WordPress I used the Social Plugin by MailChimp to automatically post, but plugins are not an option with a static website.
But as I was working on a recipe in If This Then That – IFTTT this morning it hit me, I can use IFTTT to automatically post a link to my new blog posts in Twitter and Facebook. To create the recipe:
Back in June I road in the Great Ohio Bike Adventure (GOBA). It consists of a series of 45-6o mile bike rides over the course of a week. During our numerous downtimes, I was having a discussion with my uncle about robots and automated drivers. As we were talking, there was a point I wanted to make but I couldn’t quite remember the information I wanted to use so I told him I “had to look it up”. Of course, his reply was “What did you do before smartphones”. It was at this moment I realized that the smartphone wasn’t a crutch. If it wasn’t for the smartphone, I wouldn’t have know the information existed in the first place. I use my smartphone for making available to me the information that is available.
It’s funny the cycles that tech goes through. When the Internet was in its infancy, everything was as open as it could be. The protocols were all based on open standards, and your machine could talk to any other machine. Then came the online services of the 80s. Compuserv, AOL, Delphi, Prodigy. Each service trying to keep you in their own little world. Messages did not pass between the services for the most part. In the 90s with the creation of the world wide web things became more open again. THe juggernaut of AOL/Compuserv collapsed while the other services faded into obscurity. This lasted until the middle 00s with the popularity of social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. We are now moving back to the 80s where everyone wants to keep you on their service. Alas, that is a rant for another day…
Fortunately, there are technologies that have been around to help minimize some of these influences. Today I’m talking about Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Created in 1988, IRC is a simple chat protocol that supports channels (or rooms) and private messages.
To help you get started, I’ve set up a chat room called #eduk8me on Freenode. To connect, you simply have to visit the Freenode web chat client. Create yourself a nickname, enter the captcha, and click Connect. The channel field will already be filled in.
Welcome to #eduk8me! Send me a private message saying hey! This will send me a notification.
/msg mr_rcollins Hey!
The simplicity of the protocol has some issues that we’re not used to dealing with. The first is that there are no accounts. You can reserve your nickname though, so others cannot use it unless they have the password. Freenode has a FAQ which deals with nickname registration. If you are just starting out you really don’t need to worry about it.
Where this comes in handy is when you want to have a group chat. IRC doesn’t require yet another user account and can scale pretty well. There are ways to do moderated chats too.
Check it out and tell me hi!
Tonight I was playing around with Assistive Touch on my iPhone. In the Accessibility Settings, Assistive Touch places a “button” on the screen. This button gives the user access to certain capabilities, such as the ability to push a virtual home button. Playing around tonight I went into the Favorites area. This lets you record a gesture, with which you can play by pressing a button in this Favorites area.
So in my playing around, I created my first gesture, which was just a tap. Once I added this saved gesture as a favorite I turned it on. Lo and behold, I had a blue circle on screen, which I could move around and when I released it showed tap. I then realized that one could turn this on when recording iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch screencasts and the taps would show up.
To get started:
Open up Settings, tap General and on the left, select Accessibility.
Under Physical and Motor, tab Assistive Touch.
Turn on Assistive Touch and then tab Create a new Gesture…. To create the touch gesture, just tap. To save the gesture, tap Save in the upper right corner. Name it Touch.
Now launch the app you want to record, tap the assistive touch button, select favorites and your newly created gesture, Touch. A blue circle will follow your figure around the screen, showing a tap when you release your finger.
Unfortunately, no other gestures work other than the current one selected. You also probably will want to create some sliding gestures, which would allow you to show a slide in the screencast. If you are switching gestures, you will probably want to cut out the selection of the gesture in your favorite movie editing application.
The newer versions of Firefox has a great feature where upon startup, web pages in tabs aren’t activated until they are clicked on. It’s really nice when you’re restarting the browser with several tabs open. Unfortunately, Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature. As I was searching for something like this for Google Chrome, I came across The Great Suspender.
This extension lets you suspend tabs, either automatically after a time or from a menu option. I leave it set to auto suspend tabs after 5 minutes in the background. You can also whitelist web pages that should never be suspended, which I use for Feedly and IMO.im.
In my district we are currently planning our 1 to 1 program. We settled on 11.6″ laptops running Ubuntu as the device. The problem that has arisen is how to we ensure consistency with students who wish to bring their own laptop. If they were Chromebooks, the BYOD students could just run Chrome. But with the flexibility of Ubuntu comes the complexity for BYOD. That is, until one considers VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is a program that lets you virtualize operating systems on your computer. For example, your computer (host)can be running Microsoft Windows, and run a virtual machine of Ubuntu Linux. The virtual machine (guest) is separate from your current system, anything in the virtual machine does not affect the host. The guest can even be running the same operating system, running Microsoft Windows in a virtual machine on a host running Microsoft Windows. There are some legal implications to running Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X in a virtual machine. For Microsoft Windows you will need to purchase an additional license for each copy of Microsoft Windows that you would run in a virtual machine. Under Mac OS X 10.8 you are allowed to virtualize up to 5 virtual machines on Apple hardware. Since we are looking at Ubuntu, these licensing restrictions don’t affect us.
With Ubuntu, a standard image can be created with the exact same set up as the laptops. Even management of the virtual machine would be the same. So for our students and teachers, it won’t matter whether or not they have a school laptop or their own laptop. Everyone will have the same setup. It’s a brilliant solution to issues that have been brought up on BYOD.
Interruptions are deadly. Well, maybe that’s a little bit of exaggeration. But even three second interruptions can cause problems. I’ve decided to take back the notifications on my phone.
First stop was the phone ringer. Apple doesn’t have a silent ringtone on the iPhone, so I had to search. In my searching I came across the article iPhone tip: Use a Silent Ringtone to Screen Calls in Your Sleep. It not only contained the silent ringtone but also directions on using it. My default ringtone is silence, and a different ringtone is set for those people for which my phone should always right.
Next up was text alerts. The iPhone has a silent text alert, so that part was easier than the ringtone. Then I also went in and added a tone for just a few people.
Finally, I went into Settings -> Notifications and turned off the sound notifications for most of my applications.
Now I have a nice, mostly silent phone which doesn’t interrupt me.