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 …
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 natural fluency with digital …
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 …
I’ve been noticing an interesting thread in online conversations recently, with people I respect either bashing or defending the LMS. Audrey Watters’ Beyond the LMS seems to suggest they’re a sinister tool of imperial control, Jim Groom and Brian Lamb offer five arguments against the LMS, and Jeremy B Williams’ post implies …
You know that moment when the room is quiet and everyone is calmly focused on a speaker– and then someone’s annoying ringtone goes off right in the middle, shattering the silence and attracting unwanted attention? Don’t be that doofus. I created a couple of IFTTT recipes to save the sanity …
A longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator of mine who works in new teacher education is starting a blog, and asked me for some help on getting started. Here’s my email response… Hi Friend, There’s some degree of “stage fright” that comes with blogging, so I’ve had to tell myself a …
If you’re a student or an academic, you probably have a large volume of reading you need to do every week, and there’s only so many hours that you can be hunched over your desk reading. Why not clip your next few readings to Pocket, the read-it-later app for iOS …
As a teacher and frequent presenter, I always carry a MacBook Pro DVI to VGA adapter in my bag so I can connect to any overhead projector or flat screen wherever I’m speaking. This approach works well, but has several downsides that the amazing $35 Google ChromeCast can improve upon: …
