After reading a few end‐of‐year wrapups, I realized that I’ve never done a roundup of useful Android apps for productivity and education. This is a list of the very best of the best apps I use on Android to stay productive, connected, and collaborative on the go.
I’m very interested in how open source publishing tools like Wordpress can empower individuals to own their data, understand and learn from their tools, and protect against the strange encroachments of privacy and power that...
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...
With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K‑12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerfu...
If you are trying to create a branded online identity, it helps to have a consistent username across all of the major sites. With NameChk.com, you can search once and see if your favorite username is available on 159 different social media sites.
Just enter the username you want in the search ba...
In my last post, I recommended using a password manager like LastPass to help you create strong, unique passwords for all of the different sites you use. If you don’t like the idea of storing passwords in the cloud, the next best way is to create a...
Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay f...
In Cultivate Your Personal Learning Network Part I, you learned to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. The second part of the Learning Loop is the “Outputs” stage. Here you will...
Ge.tt is a great free tool for quickly and easily sharing files that are too large to send by email (up to 100mb). As a digital art teacher, I often had students trying to send me videos, flash files, audio, or big presentations. As a digital designer, I use this ty...
As faculty, you likely spend several hours every week carefully reading, evaluating, and grading student work. Research shows that students report higher course satisfaction when they get better grades and when faculty exhibit “immediacy and presence behaviors”. This finding suggests that giving i...