I’ve been using oCam as a screen recorder for several months and I love it!
With oCam, you can create recordings in mp4 that are free of watermarks. Audio from the computer or a microphone can be captured during a recording in oCam. It is easy to use and a perfect start for the Windows user. Check out this full review at AddictiveTips and download it today.
Over the past few days, I’ve been tinkering around with the cloud storage site Copy.com. It’s a lot like Dropbox and the others.
After exploring Google Drive’s ability to host files and provide direct links, I wanted to see if Copy could do the same thing. Turns out it can for most files (not html). below is an example:
change this: https://www.copy.com/s/duJ7I70PLvTK/interview109-clip.mp3
to this: https://copy.com/duJ7I70PLvTK/interview109-clip.mp3
I made a bookmarklet that does the URL hacking for you. Follow the steps below to put it into use:
(UPDATE: Copy.com made some changes. The bookmarklet about doesn’t work any longer. Changing the path still seems to work fine.)
Speaking of bookmarklets, here is one that will switch your Google Drive folder to a hosting folder like I described in a previous post.
I caught this TEDx a while back and a few points really struck a cord with me.
“…when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation”
After seeing countless TED Talks that were meant to inspire education reform, I found myself duped by what Bratton described as “placebo innovation.” Bratton explains:
In this case the placebo is worse than ineffective, it’s harmful. It diverts your interest, enthusiasm and outrage until it’s absorbed into this black hole of affectation.
Too often I feel like some “reformers” are implying that we’d improve education if every teacher would just realize “x” and “have the courage to change.” Bratton points out:
Problems are not “puzzles” to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It’s not true. “Innovation” defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo.
Bottom-line: If the problems we face in education were easy to solve, they’d be solved. But Bratton outlines that tough problems take a lot more than just ‘talk’ (or the latest blog post).
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.
Last week we interviewed Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. We talked a lot about how robots will affect the future. However, there was a segment of the interview that really touched on the role of the teacher and technology in the classroom.
Nourbakhsh explains the new challenges teachers face when students are working with technology in the classroom:
…educators not only need to give students the power to invent, because they need to be creators, but they need to teach them what it means to think about the process of invention, to think about the ethics of society and that’s not a lesson that we’ve ever been busy teaching people in say middle school or high school before.
When asked about teachers who feel they don’t know enough about technology, he explains:
…teachers are decades older than their students, or at least a decade older, they know about society, they know about ethics, they know about rhetoric. And we can create resources that make it ever easier for them to teach with that. But basically we’re giving people much more powerful weapons of speech. And if we do that, we have to also teach them how to use that speech. If we decouple those in the wrong way, it’s a disaster. Then we have this zoo and our quality of life goes to heck.
You can find the entire show at LabOutLoud.com, but I clipped out the segment that speaks to technology integration and share it below.
P.S. In this clip, co-host Brian Bartel coins the phrase “edtech smog” to describe the instances where technology pollutes our mission as educators. I’m putting Voki and Animoto at the top of my list as #EdtechSmog.
Update [10/2/2016]: It appears that Google has finally put a stop to this trick.
Update [11/7/2016]: Looks like Jonathan in the comments has figured a new way to do it!
Update [2/7/2017]: The website http://gdurl.com works too!
Imagine you want to use a QR code so guests at Parents’ Night can scan the code and stream video or audio straight to their mobile device. If you share the files in Google Drive, users will be taken to a Google page where they have to download the file first. But if you can create a link that points directly to the file, users can access the content right in their mobile browser.
Turns out you can do this while still using Google Drive. Any public folder in Drive can host files and provide direct links to the files.
How to create the hosting URL:
https://googledrive.com/host/FolderID
This will provide a folder that will give direct links to files inside the folder.
Note: hosting view will not display files created in Google Docs.
Example:
Once in the hosting folder, you can right click on any of the files to get a direct link to the file.
I’ve been looking at a lot of fonts lately. Like many others, I’m not a fan of the Comic Sans font. To me, it just looks sloppy. Since Comic Sans comes closer than other fonts to matching the look of handwriting, we see it used A LOT in elementary schools. Yet, I think there are even better choices.
While Handwriting Without Tears is a company popular for it’s handwriting teaching materials, they do not sell their font. At their website, they recommend using Century Gothic as a substitute. The lower case “a” is usually the first character I look at. There are only a handful of fonts that display this letter similar to the shape that is taught to kids. As you can see below, Comic Sans follows the shape in spirit but Century Gothic does a much better job.
If you want to search your computer for other font options, then visit the website flipping typical. It offers a perfect way to view all the fonts installed on your computer. Make sure to click “load more” at the bottom of the page to see all your options.
KG Primary Dots is another font I found online that is available for free if your use is non-commercial. It offers a dotted font for tracing and lined fonts for extra guidance.
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a font nerd. Check out the great documentary titled Helvetica (it’s on Netflix) and you will be too.
Since 2007, I’ve been co-producing a podcast, titled Lab Out Loud, for the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). With each episode, I like to have all the important details about the show saved right in the mp3 file.
I use a free program called Mp3tag to add things like title, artist, and cover art to each mp3. Mp3tag allows you to copy the tag from a previous file right into the new file. This makes updating new files a breeze.
Despite its name, Mp3tag supports a wide variety of audio files. Beyond its simply features, Mp3tag offers a few extra tricks for managing large collections of audio. I have been using this free tool for years and recommend that you give it a look.
When children and adolescents have unlimited and unsupervised access to media, evidence has shown that this exposure can lead to several health effects such as academic difficulties, obesity, substance abuse, and aggression. Yet, we live in a media-rich world where devices like tablets and smartphones can also provide many benefits. To acknowledge this need for balance, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has recently updated their guidelines for children and adolescents with new policy statements on screen time.
To start the screen time conversation with parents, the AAP recommends that pediatricians begin asking these two questions at every well-child visit: How much recreational screen time does your child or teenager consume daily? Is there a TV set or an Internet connected device in the child’s or teenager’s bedroom?
The AAP recommends that parents limit entertainment screen time to less than one to two hours per day. They suggest that families create a media plan for their homes and keep televisions and other Internet connected devices out of a child’s bedroom.
Schools and teachers should be considering these guidelines too. How can parents make a media plan for their family without knowing what is being consumed at school? We must be careful not to contribute to a child’s entertainment screen time diet.
Many games and apps are labeled “educational” but have no measured effectiveness to support the claim. Some are simply just interactive toys. Dr. Ari Brown, pediatrician and lead author of policy provided by the AAP in 2011, questions the link between an interactive game and the learning it promises to provide. “There’s nothing wrong with a toy being fun, engaging a child for an amount of time. But to promote it as being educational we really need to do research to find out,” explains Brown.
Based on the new AAP guidelines and recommendations, there are many things for teachers to consider. Online games and touch-screen apps can be incredibly engaging for students. However, we must select tools that can demonstrate a targeted approach to student learning. Look for tools that have research to support their educational benefits and be critical of those that will only contribute to a child’s daily dose of entertainment screen time.
With Google’s new version of Android comes improved multi-user functionality. Google explains:
Share your tablet with friends and family – each person has a separate customizable space, including personal homescreens, wallpaper, apps, storage, and more. You can also manage access to apps and content to create an experience that’s appropriate for each member of the family.
Each member of the family? Really? What about those family members under 13 years old? Here’s what you get when you try to create an account for kids under 13:
Google does this because of COPPA, a U.S. law that requires online web sites and services to get parental consent for all children under the age of 13 before they can share any information with the web site.
At the press event announcing the new Nexus 7, Google demonstrates a child’s profile and how the access restrictions can be managed by parents. In this situation, the child user does not appear to be old enough to have a Google account. This child’s profile is sort of sub-account that lives within the tablet’s environment and does not need to be associated with a Google account.
However, without a Google account, the child cannot manage his or her own content used in other Google services. Apps like Drive, Calendar, and Maps will need an account to save content. Many parents just let their child use a parent account for these other Google services. Other parents create an account for their child with a false birthday. I suspect that most parents don’t use the multi-user features at all.
I think Google could do more for families. We have Google Apps for business and education. Why not for families? Instead of prohibiting accounts for children under age 13, Google should redirect to a space where parents can create and manage accounts for their kids. Here parents could control access restrictions for the accounts and pass the account over once the child is old enough.
Google already has a plan for the death of Google accounts. It’s time they improve the process for the birth of Google accounts.
Another group is continuing the coding to learn theme. The non-profit foundation Code.org is hoping to increase computer programming education across the world. They’ve created a video with an impressive cast (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh…) but my favorite quote comes from Gabe Newell.
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know, you’re going look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
Check out Code.org to get started immediately.
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