I was never a worse insomniac than when I was teaching. I would often spend nights just staring at the ceiling, my mind racing with lesson ideas, concerns about students, or replaying challenging events from the day.

Now, smartphone apps can actually monitor your sleep cycles and wake you up with...

I’ve been blabbering on recently about #Markdown here on TedCurran.net, and I just managed to interest a roomful of seemingly sane people why putting weird characters all over your writing is a good idea. I’m taking this as a sign that people get it– we need to write for the web, not the deskt...

Picture this: You stayed up all last night preparing an amazing lecture, complete with the perfect YouTube video to illustrate the concept for your students. Class begins, all the students arrive and listen in rapt attention to your opening r...

In recent years, a few tools have emerged to  save websites for later reading in a more readable format. These sites, like Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote Clearly, and Readability strip away all the ads and idiosyncratic blog styling from online articles, leaving only a visua...

Most of us grew up writing in a word processor, editing our words for the printed page. I argued recently that we need to re‐train ourselves to write for the web instead of the printed page since the web, not desktop app files, has emerged as the...

For all the wonderful things you can do on the Internet, there are almost as many little annoyances that make you wish it were just a bit cooler. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just press a button to turn off Facebook ads, make a page easier to read, download YouTube videos, or get some more back...

I just attended the Flipped Classroom conference yesterday and it gave me a chance to think carefully about how we might approach flipping instruction at SMU. Most of the attendees were K‑12 teachers using free tools to flip their own classroom, so it’s a different proposition to try and recommend...

This week at work, they replaced my ailing but valiant Dell XP laptop with a new HP Windows7 notebook for work, and then surprised me with a dual‐booting iMac desktop for me to aggressively customize and evaluate the next wave of standard applications w...

Trello is a to‐do list manager and project management webapp that’s based on the metaphor of index cards pinned to a board. The cards each flip over, giving you a workspace where you can discuss the task, create smaller checklists, assign responsibility, or add other notes. To change th...

This post was originally written as a response to Kyle M. Jones’ posting on TheCorkboard.org entitled “Digital Learning and Badges” in which he calls for greater discussion around using “badges” to certify student learning online. Here is my response:

Everything I’ve heard is that badges are...