A faculty recently approached me asking how he could produce Khan Academy – style video lessons. He was looking for an Android tablet equivalent to ShowMe, the iPad app that lets you write freehand, record your voice, and post videos online similar...
How long is too long for a lecture? Teachers can commonly spend upwards of 45 minutes lecturing in class. This arbitrary time frame is something we’ve settled into thanks to the traditional lengths of classroom meeti...
This past year has brought a massive amount of attention to Massive Open Online Courses, and much speculation about what they mean for traditional institutions of learning. The education and technology blogosphere have been breathlessly predicting the end of the world for traditional, brick‐an...
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...
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...
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...
Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user‐created Add‐Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add‐ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add‐ons you pile on...
