Up until now I’ve used dedicated Markdown editors like Haroopad and MacDown as a tool where I can focus on writing, while reserving more sophisticated code editors like Coda and Atom for web design projects. My favorite Markdown editors are all young tools in active development, and none of them …
In response to Kaplan University Begins Offering Personalized Competency Reports to More than 40,000 Students Kaplan University’s Personalized Competency Reports It’s great to see Kaplan’s Competency Report, though it’s a bit less granular than I was expecting. I’ve seen at other institutions where they have a small set of high-level …
Why I Would Have Avoided LA’s iPad Debacle In response to the Wired article “What Schools Must Learn from LA’s iPad Debacle”. [Full disclosure: I am a Pearson employee but have no inside knowledge of this deal. This analysis is mine alone.] When I learned of LAUSD’s shambolic iPad 1:1 …
This post started life as a response to a question on Reddit and grew into a far-reaching manifesto on my approach to staying current in edtech. The question is reprinted at the top and my remarks follow. In Response to: Hi teachers, how do you normally find out about new …
A response to PowerPoint Remix Rant by Mike Caulfield. Mike laments how the long list of specialized graphical tools in PowerPoint is a recipe for making Open Ed Resources that are next to impossible to reuse, remix, and repurpose to other contexts. Most things work like this, unfortunately, encouraging us …
You may know that most websites collect some data about your browsing habits when you visit the site. Some of these cookies are pretty benign, giving the site owners basic statistics they can use to customize content. I use WordPress JetPack and Google Analytics on TedCurran.net so I can understand …
I have been researching open source user feedback tools, and I stumbled upon a very nice app called AllOurIdeas.org. The app takes a novel approach to user feedback, allowing your audience to choose between two suggested answers that you “pre-seed” into the survey. This is great if you have already …
Foodies make an obsession out of “knowing your farmer” and “knowing where your food comes from”, but shouldn’t the same thing go for the people behind your most beloved apps? One weird habit I’ve gotten into is to actually emailing quick notes of encouragement and suggestions to the developers of my …
Embed from Getty Images OK, friends– it’s time to get over it. You might call young people “digital native students” but there are severe limits to their ability to turn that geekdom into real learning. The persistent myth of modern digital native students connotes for many that millennial students have a …
This week I discovered Black Menu for Chrome, an extension that lets you access any of your Google tools from a dropdown in the browser. You can invoke it with a keystroke and quickly navigate to the tool you need. I’m finding this is a huge improvement over my regular …
