Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 12/22/2012
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Let’s kill technology journalism | Jamie Kelly
Jamie Kelly does a nice job of dissecting much of what is wrong with technology journalism - going for the trending topic instead of saying "this topic is trending because of misinformation" (i.e. Instagram terms of service changes). I think these points are excellent and can also apply to much of what happens in the education circles as well -- if everybody is talking about ___, then everyone is searching about ____, then everyone is writing about ____ so they will be found. Sometimes it is good not to be everybody but to be somebody who is different and more importantly, who goes through the hype to be as accurate as possible.
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Remains of the Day: Facebook May Let Strangers Message You For $1
With 7.5 million kids under 13 on Facebook, the idea that they are testing allowing strangers to message you for $1 is a problem. The whole COPPA/ Lie about your age to get on Facebook coupled with location based services on smartphones that don't require disclosure to parents is going to come to a head and if companies continue to pretend that lying on a checkbox absolves them of the responsbility to protect children, they are wrong.
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What's All the Fuss About Evernote? Should I Be Using It?
This article from Lifehacker discusses "what's the deal about evernote" so that people can decide if it is for them. I've left and come back to evernote after I had a bad patch upgrade from Evernote that took a while for me to resolve. I think one of the most useful things I use it for is those procedures in PowerSchool that I do infrequently - like what the exact procedures are for how handle Academic Banquet records in Powerschool or checklists for starting the new year in Powerschool - I have quite a few of these checklists and instructions because I never could find my notes and always had to start over. ;-)
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Everbot Connects Gmail and Google Calendar to Evernote for Quick Note Sharing
Evernote is one of my favorite apps and I'm constantly looking around the web for great ideas. Everbot is my next tool that I'll use to link evernote with gmail. It also has some google calendaring features, but I'm most excited about the ability to add to and retrieve from evernote into email without a lot of hassle. Evernote, in my opinion, exceeds the ability of other services and notebooks because of its: ubiquity, functionality and the fact is has so many apps for the service including vJournal which I use to take notes daily, and also because of how it can search every kind of text imaginable, including handwritten text. While some use evernote and dropbox interchangeably - there is a dramatic difference. I don't need or want to reference every document but may want to open them up on multiple computers -- thus Dropbox - but I do need my notes on running my life to move with me from computer to computer -- thus Evernote.
