Google fonts are amazing. It’s a huge library of free, open-licensed fonts that give web designers a huge new palette to work with, going beyond the same old tired “web safe” fonts. (Look around! I use them extensively on TedCurran.net. Nice, huh?) They’re hosted on Google’s servers and can be added to your website or blog with a single line… Read more →
In trying to boil down the secrets of being a good computer user, I came up with this simple Internet Mantra– please share it with your technophobic friends… “I am unique but my tech problems are not. Someone has had this problem before me, solved it, and posted the answer online. I need only to find it.“
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 remarks. As you open your browser to play the video… NOTHING. Your internet connection is out, your lecture is now a… Read more →
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 we might adopt across campus. In other words, I’ve had to start from scratch on two new… Read more →
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.
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 bar and it will give you a graphic… Read more →
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 for access to the many… Read more →
If you haven’t heard of Chrome OS, it’s Google’s attempt to do away with the desktop altogether and have everything that happens on your computer happen inside the browser. This means that instead of opening Outlook for your email, you go to Gmail or Hotmail on the web. Instead of opening Photoshop to resize that photo, you use Aviary.com. Instead… Read more →
This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place…. This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career… Read more →
As part of our LMS Evaluation, we’ve investigated concerns around Instructure’s viability and longevity as a business. Recent events surrounding Blackboard should lead us to question its viability with equal diligence. First there was last week’s report that Blackboard had retained a financial services firm to help them respond to non-binding buyout offers. Today, Michael Feldstein discusses a spate of… Read more →
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