How conservative are we required to be

The title was just a test of sensitivity to our political climate. If you came here hoping for me to complain about Republicans, I do that on my other blog.

The issue here concerns interpretation of the obligation of schools to protect students from “bad” online content and inappropriate experiences. Here is an interpretation of expectations offered by Tina Barseghian interpreting Karen Cator. If concerned about CIPA, read carefully. Interpretation is they key term here and interpretation is always the challenge in implementation. Hence, this is why the meaning of legislation is often generated via case law. I realize this does not help those just wanting to know the rules. Legislation will not include the list of sites your school must block.

The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet access or internal network connections with E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ access to content that may be harmful to minors, including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities.

It is worth reading the comments to the Barseghian post.

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Box – 50 Gigabyte free offer

I saw this post on LifeHacker concerning another of the online storage options for those of us with multiple devices. Box.net is offering 50 gigabytes to iPad and iPhone users for the next 50 days. The free offer is normally 5. So, if you act quickly and the company stays in business, this offer would seem to give you more free storage than you would pay for with Drop Box or Google. I added the app to my iPad. This seems to be a great deal and I place some trust in the endorsement from LifeHacker.

I  keep wondering how they expect to get people to pay for something. Something more must be coming.

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Annotate PDFs

I have a complicated system for organizing and annotating PDFs. I keep my PDFs within Yep which allows me to tag the hundreds of documents I save so I can locate them again and I highlight and annotate these documents using Skim (see following image). However, because I spend so much of my time reading and annotating, I am constantly searching for the newest and greatest.

MacWorld just published a “how to” claiming you do not need to purchase or find an annotation app, you can just use Preview, the general purpose document tool that comes with the Mac. The article is quite helpful.

Note: I do see that the reviews of YEP from App Store are negative claiming it does not work. The reviews are for version 3. My experience has been with version 2.something. You can download a trial version at no cost and I have done this. I encountered no problem locating files with this trial version so the claims in the complaints do not match my experience.

P.S. – this post deserves an update. After generating this post, I paid for and downloaded the app. I did initially have difficulty getting it to work. I wish I could explain the fix-up strategy. Unfortunately, like many of my debugging practices, I tried a bunch of things and the program started working. The last thing I did was to drag a pdf into YEP and then other pdfs began to appear. This can’t be what you have to do to get it work and must be some chance event, but this is what I did.

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100 billion downloads and going strong – Google Earth

This post from Google LatLong marks the 1oo billionth download of Google Earth. The post offers a little history, links to some interesting applications, and offers the link you can use to download it yourself.

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100 Cameras in 1

Here is a suggestion for those of you who like photography and wish you could do more with your images. 100 Cameras in 1 is an app from Stuck in Customs and Trey Radcliff (I listen to his commentary on the TWIT network all of the time). The app allows you to apply creative modifications to existing images.

Here is a before and after image modified with 100 Cameras on my iPad. I took the original last week in Northern Minnesota. This is not a bad image, but the following seems to have more feeling.

 

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What was there

Whatwasthere is a site encouraging the mapping of photos documenting history to a Google map. You can enter a zip code to view photos that have been submitted or submit photos of your own.

This might make an interesting class project – see our description of a similar project using Scribble Maps

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