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… Read more →
Living without the Internet for a year
I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.” So did leaving the Internet fix Paul’s ails? And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed… Read more →
#tlah Getting started with virtualization using VirtualBox
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… Read more →
Apple is allowing you to download older versions of apps that are compatible with your current OS
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. Read more →
#tlah Push notifications on the cheap
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… Read more →
Almost half of U.S. jobs could be replaced by the computer in 20 years
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… Read more →
The technology every school needs
School air conditioners: Kids need to learn. Baltimore County will be closing its public schools early today due to the unseasonable heat. We’re also seeing school closures widely in the midwest. And it really is hot. But all across the region things that aren’t schools are staying open thanks to the miracle of climate control technology. The fact that we… Read more →
Six months too young for the iPad?
Discovering That Your 18-Month-Old Is Using an iPad in Pre-School On a recent summer day in Nashville, Kara Teising opened her Facebook page for a lunchtime scroll through her timeline when she discovered a photo posted by her son’s daycare: an image of her 18-month-old son surrounded by other toddlers, their chubby faces glued to a brightly colored, animated screen… Read more →
#tlah Managing your class list in a spreadsheet, part 1
You have a class list, or several, and you need to manage those names. Your principal may need a list for various reasons, or you may want to email all the students in your class, or you may want to import your students into a new web service that you’d like to use. Now you could manage the list manually,… Read more →
Teach like a hacker
It’s very seldom that I type a phrase into Google and get no results, but that is what a Google search for “Teach like a hacker” returns (Bing also returns no results). Maybe it is the negative connotations that Hollywood has embedded into our culture on the term hacker that scares people away from it. I believe that the educational… Read more →