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 edTech products?
H...

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, unfortunat...

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 und...
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 alre...
You can think of BitTorrent Sync as “Dropbox without the Cloud”. Not to be confused with the underlying technology of BitTorrent, this is a way of keeping a folder and files sync’d across mul...
This is a reflection on Joshua Kim’s article, 6 Objections to Technology in Higher Ed. I’m going to address each of the major points, but for more context, please refer to the original article.
Objection #1 – Money Spent On Campus Technology Is Money Not Available to Spend Elsewhere:
Price g...
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...
This video shows you how you can quickly convert a Markdown formatted presentation outline into an HTML5 presentation using Reveal.js. I think this method is a great way to familiarize yourself with web technologies while producing attractive and powerful presentations that work gr...


