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Creating Apps for Education?

I’ve been keeping a list of local schools that are using apps, and I’ve carved out some time this summer to do some personal development on creating apps. Conduit’s App Maker wouldn’t even require much time.

Have you created an app for your school or taken an online course to learn how? I’d like to know what you used, or if you took a class would your recommend it?

New Study Reports One in Six Students Victim of Cyberbullying

One in six U.S. high school students reported being electronically bullied within the past 12 months, according to a new study.

The study also found that almost one-third of high school students spend three or more hours each day playing video games or using a computer.

“Electronic bullying of high school students threatens the self-esteem, emotional well-being and social standing of youth at a very vulnerable stage of their development,” said Andrew Adesman, M.D., F.A.A.P., of Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York and lead author of the study.

A Hal Pomeranz from 2010 suggests a great way to teach TCP/IP header structure to students: he builds header diagrams out of legos, then mixes them up and has the students reconstruct them. The use of color here really highlights certain portions of the packet header. For example, the source and destination addresses and ports really jump out. But there are some other, more subtle color patterns that I worked in here. For example, if you look closely you’ll see that I matched the color of the ACK bit with the blue in the ACK number field. Similarly the colors of the SYN bit and the sequence number match, as do the URG bit and urgent pointer field. Actually I wish I had a couple of more colors available. Yes, Lego comes in dozens of colors these days, but they only make 2×8 blocks (aka one “Lego Byte”) in six colors: White, Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Beige. So while I tried to use Beige exclusively for size fields, Red for reserved bits, Yellow for checksums, and so on, I ultimately ended up having to use these colors for other fields as well– for example, the yellow sequence number fields in the TCP header. Maybe I should have just bought a bunch of “nibbles” (2×4 blocks) in other colors and not been so choosy about using full “Lego Bytes”. High-res

A Hal Pomeranz from 2010 suggests a great way to teach TCP/IP header structure to students: he builds header diagrams out of legos, then mixes them up and has the students reconstruct them.

The use of color here really highlights certain portions of the packet header. For example, the source and destination addresses and ports really jump out. But there are some other, more subtle color patterns that I worked in here. For example, if you look closely you’ll see that I matched the color of the ACK bit with the blue in the ACK number field. Similarly the colors of the SYN bit and the sequence number match, as do the URG bit and urgent pointer field.

Actually I wish I had a couple of more colors available. Yes, Lego comes in dozens of colors these days, but they only make 2×8 blocks (aka one “Lego Byte”) in six colors: White, Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Beige.

So while I tried to use Beige exclusively for size fields, Red for reserved bits, Yellow for checksums, and so on, I ultimately ended up having to use these colors for other fields as well– for example, the yellow sequence number fields in the TCP header. Maybe I should have just bought a bunch of “nibbles” (2×4 blocks) in other colors and not been so choosy about using full “Lego Bytes”.

theantidote gestures:

Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System

Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.

“We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology.”

Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.

More at DigInfo here

RELATED: This is very similar to a concept developed in 1991 called ‘The Digital Desk’ [link]

(via prostheticknowledge:)

(via notational)

Tough Questions on Texting in the Classroom image via flickr:CC | Stitch Does it make sense to ban texting if students ignore the ban and teachers back away from enforcing it? Can a ban be enforced? How about in a large course, can it be enforced then? Should it be enforced?  What are the costs of enforcing a “no texting” policy? Public altercations with students that erode the climate for learning in the classroom? But texting itself erodes the learning atmosphere of classroom, doesn’t it? What about taking the “if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them” approach? Does texting show a lack of respect? Perhaps, but are students doing it because they want to disrespect the teacher? High-res

Tough Questions on Texting in the Classroom

image via flickr:CC | Stitch

  • Does it make sense to ban texting if students ignore the ban and teachers back away from enforcing it? Can a ban be enforced? How about in a large course, can it be enforced then? Should it be enforced?  What are the costs of enforcing a “no texting” policy? Public altercations with students that erode the climate for learning in the classroom? But texting itself erodes the learning atmosphere of classroom, doesn’t it?
  • What about taking the “if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them” approach?
  • Does texting show a lack of respect? Perhaps, but are students doing it because they want to disrespect the teacher?
Behind the Webcam’s Watchful Eye, Online Proctoring Takes Hold Hailey Schnorr has spent years peering into the bedrooms, kitchens, and dorm rooms of students via Webcam. In her job proctoring online tests for universities, she has learned to focus mainly on students’ eyes. “What we look for is eye movement,” says Ms. Schnorr. “When the eyes start veering off to the side, that’s clearly a red flag.” The result is a monitoring regime that can seem a bit Orwellian. Rather than one proctor sitting at the head of a physical classroom and roaming the aisles every once in a while, remote proctors peer into a student’s home, seize control of her computer, and stare at her face for the duration of a test, reading her body language for signs of impropriety. Even slight oddities of behavior often lead to “incident reports,” which the companies supply to colleges along with recordings of the suspicious behavior. image via flickr:CC | joeythibault How much proctoring is enough?

Behind the Webcam’s Watchful Eye, Online Proctoring Takes Hold

Hailey Schnorr has spent years peering into the bedrooms, kitchens, and dorm rooms of students via Webcam. In her job proctoring online tests for universities, she has learned to focus mainly on students’ eyes.

“What we look for is eye movement,” says Ms. Schnorr. “When the eyes start veering off to the side, that’s clearly a red flag.”

The result is a monitoring regime that can seem a bit Orwellian. Rather than one proctor sitting at the head of a physical classroom and roaming the aisles every once in a while, remote proctors peer into a student’s home, seize control of her computer, and stare at her face for the duration of a test, reading her body language for signs of impropriety.

Even slight oddities of behavior often lead to “incident reports,” which the companies supply to colleges along with recordings of the suspicious behavior.

image via flickr:CC | joeythibault

How much proctoring is enough?

Robot recruiters THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations.For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take the time to reach informed decisions. Such people should be better employees. Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, pored over nearly 3m data points from more than 30,000 employees to find this nugget. How long before highered admissions start using similar methods? photo via flickr:CC | IntelFreePress High-res

Robot recruiters

THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations.

For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.

It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take the time to reach informed decisions. Such people should be better employees. Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, pored over nearly 3m data points from more than 30,000 employees to find this nugget.

How long before highered admissions start using similar methods?

photo via flickr:CC | IntelFreePress