Dumbing down as progress

Posted on April 23, 2015 by admin

It annoys when a service is updated and loses capabilities in the process. This seems to happen fairly regularly of late and I am not certain if the idea is to somehow make the user experience easier or removing capabilities is a cost saving measure (own up if this is the reason).

One of the capabilities of Flickr I thought had great value to students was the ability to add notes to images. In the old days and not in Flickr, I remember this being described as creating an image map. The idea is that one can identify “hot spots” on an image and take an action (e.g., display text) when a user mouses over that spot on the photo.

oldflckr

 

This is what the creation of a “note” used to look like on Flickr. I am fairly certain this capability has been removed. Please let me know if I am wrong.

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Earth Day

Posted on April 22, 2015 by admin

I always try to post on Earth Day to recognize environmental issues and an appreciation for the natural world.

I had hoped to capture an image and use that image as part of this post. I have the opportunity spend as much time as I want in the north woods of Wisconsin and this is a very beautiful area. I had an opportunity to photograph a large female, bald eagle, but I could not get close enough to capture a good image without my telephoto.

What I decided to do was to bring in my trail cam and see what I could find from the past couple of days. My trail cam represents one of my “tech in the wild” hobbies. We own a little over 4 acres of land and share this area with interesting wildlife. A trail cam is a motion activated camera that you position to capture images of wildlife. Hunters use these cameras for scouting. I use them just to see what I can find.

Here is the best “capture” from this week:

earthdeer

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Teens online – PEW

Posted on April 19, 2015 by admin

PEW has released the results of a new survey summarizing teen online use. I did not spot much that was new or that surprising, but educators might want to review this document for current statistics.

Fully 88% of American teens ages 13 to 17 have or have access to a mobile phone of some kind, and a majority of teens (73%) have smartphones.

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Circa

Posted on April 18, 2015 by admin

I do not read a lot on my phone, but one exception is news. I have several apps I use to follow news.

My newest fascination is Circa. Circa News is designed for presenting news on the phone and has several unique features. Circa presents a top story from each of several categories (there are other services that do this), but if you select then presents each story using a predictable pattern of elements. There is the lead story, individual quotes, additional resources, etc. The idea is that you can dive in as deep as you want. Circa offers an interesting additional feature. If you wish to continue to follow a story, you select the story and you will receive information regarding future developments.

The downside of this and similar services is that you can select from categories you want to follow, but cannot expand the categories. For example, there is not an “education” category.

circa2

 

circa1

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History of Learning to Code

Posted on April 14, 2015 by admin

Ben Williamson offers a post of the history and future of learning to code. This is a good read for those new to the “coding” in the classroom movement.

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Mobile Friendly

Posted on April 11, 2015 by admin

I knew this was coming, but did not really have an official way to check my content. Google is going to downgrade the rank of my sites because my content is not deemed by Google as “mobile friendly”. I did not really check this because my content appears find on an iPad. However, I have no run the Google check and my content failed.

mobilefriendly

 

I use standard blog software (WordPress) and standard page authoring software (Dreamweaver). I will make the adjustments as I can find the time, but this seems a great amount of work for the number of phone hits on my content.

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