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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the good, old-fashioned copy machine. But, as Armen Keteyian reports, advanced technology has opened a dangerous hole in data security.
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New research from Kaspersky Lab shows that the number of phishing attacks on social networks has increased in the first quarter of 2010, especially at Facebook, the fourth most popular online target.
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Search through 161,297 icons or browse 535 icon sets
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One of the first changes at 10 Downing Street? The social media accounts
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Instead of dismissing social media as distracting or destructive, schools should embrace it as an essential part of the curriculum. Not only does this limit the potential for students to abuse the technology, but it opens a new set of valuable educational tools.
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Behind the Scenes
I read and re-read this blog entry on the weekend. From Raffi Krikorian, it’s designed to show the forensics behind a Twitter message or tweet. I was really engaged, dare I say fascinated, with this on a number of levels.
First, the computer programmer in me just hasn’t looked seriously as any production code for a long time. The JSON code is easily read and it really is out of context since I’m doing nothing but reading it but it’s still good reading.
Secondly, I’ve always been curious about how different Twitter third party applications get and parse the information that they do. Why do some clients have certain features and others don’t? By looking through here, you can see what information is available and it’s up to the programmers and design teams to do what they might with the data.
Thirdly, I’m really interested in this from an educational perspective. A Twitter message is just 140 characters, right? No, it’s much more. As you dig, it’s easy to see just exactly how much detail and information is contained therein. In the classroom, going through and looking at an example (even if you’re not going to program an interface to it), should give students an insight to how much information is readily available to anyone who wishes to tap into it. What a great launchpad into a discussion about privacy.
Fourthly, I’m still on a geek high from the secondary Computer Contacts meeting yesterday where there were a few computer programmers in the crowd. That’s always a high moment for me and the discussions about programming really are motivating. Students who elect to take Computer Studies courses will definitely have a leg up on understanding the implications that technology has if they’re able to read and somewhat understand the following.
I really am a proponent of all that the social web has to offer to enhance education. Use is only part of it though. People do need to have some abilities to look behind the scenes to try and get a sense of exactly what’s happening.
Click for the complete document. map-of-a-tweet
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-05-11
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Search or browse our huge
collection of bestsellers, new
releases, and award winners -
Think beyond bookmarks. Inslices helps you to collect, share and organize relevant web pages selections while surfing.
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First of its kind PDF to PowerPoint conversion lets you take previously unusable information from presentations and reuse it or revise right in PowerPoint.
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All writing assignments require the writer to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out. The task seems especially daunting with biographies and autobiographies, when the author is trying to summarize an entire life. The Bio-Cube activity asks children to take on that challenge and limits their information to what will fit on six sides of a small cube. The activity helps children learn how to identify and summarize key ideas.
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Just because you build a wiki, doesn’t mean they will come. This has been my and other faculty members’ experiences in using wikis in the classroom. We all know the feeling
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Collection of logic games and puzzles
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Welcome to the world of logic games
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Estimurl.com is a perfect tool that helps you to estimate website value.Get complete website information,our unique algorithm will calculate and estimate the website daily income,daily visitors, pagerank, traffic details.Just enter the URL and you'll get an instant overview of the value of the site and other important statistics including Alexa Rank, BackLinks, Meta Description, server IP, Rank Graphs fetched in real-time,server location by map and DMOZ listing.
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The Premier Educational Dictionary and Thesaurus
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ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that is designed to let anyone easily create their own customized 3D pop-up books. Click on some of the pictures below to check out books created by members of the ZooBurst community. If you have a username and password you can log in and create your own books using the 'Login' link at the top right side of the screen.
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Hurl makes HTTP requests.
Enter a URL, set some headers, view the response, then share it with others.
Perfect for demoing and debugging APIs. -
Sharing files, paying bills, connecting with others – you do all of this online in your personal life without having to think twice. But at work? That's a whole other story.
It's time to decide if you want to continue doing things the old way, or join us in the cloud. What will you choose?
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Earth, covered by stacks of thousand of virtual photographs, corresponding in time to where they were taken by Lens readers at one "Moment in Time".
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Map of the world from a different perspective.
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I’m not a champion Scrabble player by any means – I often resort to words like “at” and “it” just to use up a turn. But with this list, hopefully I’ll be a little more creative when using tiny little words. And if all else fails, there’s always “ZQFMGB”… a worm found in New Guinea, according to Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes
Becoming Clearer
A vision of the future become much clearer to me yesterday. First of all, Canada 3.0 kicked off. From there, MindShareLearn sent out a tweet indicating that Barret Xplornet was in a position to offer broadband throughout the country.
This is exciting to think that internet access could be available everywhere. The logistic boggle the mind.
The second thing that helped me refine the vision came from reading Hexxeh’s updates about his builds of the Chromium Operating System. As you know, this project will ultimately deliver a Google operating system. I was intrigued and so went to Hexxeh’s website and downloaded his current build of the OS.
It takes a few minutes but I expanded the build and created a bootable USB key. I didn’t want to do a complete install since we’re still a ways away from a full release but I did want to check it out.
First test — I booted from the USB key on my Netbook. It was a tad slow but certainly as fast as many of the locked down traditional OS machines that I run across daily. And, it looked like — well, Chrome the browser.
The only exception was the multi-blue Chromium icon. I checked a tab or two for internet access and it worked just as well as Chrome the browser on a computer next to it!
So, I was curious about the icon and clicked it to reveal a menu as you see in the photo above. All of the links go to web resources. Ah, so this is what a web-based operating system looks like. Very interesting. I poked around and was quite impressed.
Does it feature my favourite applications? Absolutely.
Themes? Absolutely. I went to the Google Chrome theme and installed my favourite theme “Late Night” and the whole desktop changed. Designed nicely for Netbooks you’ll notice that we’re fullscreen with no status bar taking up real estate.
The only indication that this might be different from the browser (other than the Chromium icon) are the battery and connectivity icons. The connectivity is interesting with three options for Wifi, Ethernet, and Cellular.
Now, this was with my Netbook, admittedly a lower powered CPU but things went nicely. I tried booting from the USB key on an older Notebook computer. It was an even snappier response as it was when booting from a machine with an i7 processor.
But, back to the vision. With an operating system like this, all that’s required is connectivity. Therein lies the importance of the announcement aboe. For those of us who live in locations where DSL or cable are not options, this levels the playing field. In a race to provide access to all students, this could address the issues of equity. Instead of saving up for a thousand dollars for a new shiny machine so that you can collaborate in the cloud…why not go to the cloud first?
These are exciting times with a lot of converging ideas and concepts. They aren’t converging to our traditional way of thinking so we need to keep eyes and minds open.
And, Hexxeh? According to his website, he’s a 17 year old student. I shared the link with a couple of my Computer Studies teacher friends. If this doesn’t inspire those budding computer programmers…
links for 2010-05-10
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Google Docs – Tips and Resources
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Somehow these people had been able to turn the sentence "Here's a neat trick that will amuse your family and friends" into "Here's a way to pretend you have God-like powers and convince crowds of credulous and needy people to give you their money." For them, that three dollar book certainly paid for itself.
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Infographics about fake science facts.
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Think a tweet is just 140 characters of text? Think again. To developers building tools on top of the Twitter platform, they know tweets contain far more information than just whatever brief, passing thought you felt the urge to share with your friends via the microblogging network. A tweet is filled with metadata – information about when it was sent, by who, using what Twitter application and so on.
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Eighty per cent of Canadians age 16 and over used the internet for personal reasons in 2009, up from 73 per cent two years earlier, Statistics Canada reports
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Almost every teacher is aware of Google
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Canadians who want to use their iPad to surf the Web on a 3G cellphone network when Apple Inc.'s latest gadget comes to Canada later this month will be paying at least CDN$15 per month.
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BP has released this infographic, Relief Wells
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Now support Sync Google 'Buzz' to Twitter
Using pubsubhubbub protocol to make sync real-time. Forget friendfeed's ff.im forever.
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In the late ’90s and early aughts, MP3 players were known, well, as MP3 players. However, when Apple launched the iPod on October 21, 2001, it was such a huge success that it only took a couple of years for most people to simply start using the name “iPod” whenever they referred to an MP3 player.
What’s Your Follow?
So, how do you stay on top of the happening via Twitter? I’ll share mine but I’d really like to hear of better ways.
Like most people, I started with the Twitter web application. It was OK but requires a lot of work to really work it and get the power of being connected. I wandered through various Twitter clients and they are all good. But, I eventually settled on the Seesmic Desktop for my daily gatherer of information.
What I found I needed was a strategy to just look over and take a quick look and see if there was something of interest. Desktop also plays a little ding to let you know that there’s something new. What I find most powerful is the ability to have multiple columns open. In some locations, I have the luxury of attaching an old external monitor. In other locations, I just multi-task over to see what’s happening.
The key, I find, is to have relevant searches available for the quick look see.
I actually two Twitter accounts. One is just for my silliness and personal use. The other just follows news and weather stories. Between the two of them, I like to think I’ve got the world covered. (or at least my little part of it). Ever the egotist, I keep a column just for mentions of me so that I don’t miss anything. Then, I have a couple of lists. One is for my Ontario educators so that I can keep in touch with what’s happening throughout the province. I have another list that I call keynotes. In here, I’ll monitor people that I’ve heard speak at conferences or PD sessions so that I can continue the conversation. Then, I’ll have a number of different searches ongoing. I like just to follow the search term “teach” as it takes me to places that I’d never go otherwise. If I’m working on a particular topic, I’ll open another search column and just watch what’s happening related to that search term.
So, here’s what my desktop looks like at the moment.
It will change during the course of the day if something needs to be researched.
What am I missing? What strategies do you use to stay on top of things? What’s your follow?
links for 2010-05-09
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Admongo where advertising is all around you.
Online. Outside. On television. Who makes ads?
How do they work? What do they want you to do?
Here, you will explore, discover, and learn.
Can you make it to the top -
Learn to sound out and spell words as you move letters around and build small words into big words by replacing letters and reshuffling letters. You will need to drag the correct letter into a green box and then press the check button
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So, you've heard about jailbreaking, and it sounds intriguing. And dangerous. (But mostly just intriguing.) Here's how to hack your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad—yes, iPad—into an unrestricted, freshly empowered mega-machine.
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Libraries for a Postliterate Society
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The world seems to pass us by at a million miles a minute. All we want to do is to stop and catch our breath, to try and freeze time and enjoy the present moment. Motion blur photography tries to captures this idea of movement through time. The most interesting photos that use this technique keep the subject in focus while blurring out the rest of the scene. This is achieved by using a slow shutter speed and by panning the camera to track those moving objects. This effect can also created by post-editing software such as Photoshop.
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A Prezi showing how to create a Prezie
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Flow is the latest in the line of Hexxeh's hugely popular ChromiumOS builds. Flow is the most exciting version yet, bringing even more hardware support, an auto-updater, webcam support and an improved application menu
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Test Flights Into the Google Cloud – a view on the forthcoming Chrome OS
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inSSIDer is an award-winning free Wi-Fi network scanner for Windows Vista and Windows XP. Because NetStumbler doesn't work well with Vista and 64-bit XP, we built an open-source Wi-Fi network scanner designed for the current generation of Windows operating systems. inSSIDer was discussed by Lifehacker and Tekzilla!
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See big benefits by allowing people to embed your articles
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Get organized: Learn how to use Microsoft software in the classroom with tips and tricks presented in these how-to articles. You can use the search tool below to find lesson plans and how-to articles for your relevant subjects, grade levels, and products, or find articles on this page.
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Portal to web resources, categorized by topic.
An Interesting Rumour
This morning’s reads bring out this rumour. Apple’s Mobile Me to become free?
It would make a great deal of sense to see this cloud based offering made more available. For example, the service Ubuntu One is available to synchronize your computer to “the cloud”.
From Microsoft, there’s the Windows Live offering with many Microsoft features and, of course, SkyDrive for sending files to the cloud.
And, of course, there are all kinds of other services that would entice you to use their cloud computing and storage facilities. In this sense, it would seem logical that Apple would join in to add value to its products. It’s the synchronization aspect that seems to be so appealing to me in all of this.
These days, how many of us are using just a single device? We might have a home computer and a work computer and then, in the midst, a portable device. If the reports of sales of iPads are true, there are over a million people potentially looking for solutions. When you consider all of the devices that people are carrying with them, it’s a pretty big populace to ignore. And, it’s not like they can transfer documents via a USB key.
There’s a lot of good reading on the topic here.
This whole concept has big implications for business where security and reliability is king. For those of us a little removed, we still want most of these things but we want it affordable or free.
The consumer seems to be really in the driver’s seat on this one. As providers compete with each other for our loyalty, features are added to make one service better than another. Ubuntu One offers 2GB storage for free. SkyDrive weighs in at 25GB. Some services try to build in social networking and collaboration concepts. Our challenge is to find the one or ones that meet our needs best.
Into the mix comes the rumour from Apple. It makes a great deal of sense.
links for 2010-05-08
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twitTangle is a free service that helps you untangle the mess of having too many friends on twitter. We allow you to rate and tag your friends and then filter your timeline to help you easily find the tweets that are most important to you! NEW Now you can create custom groups of your followers and filter your timeline by that group.
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What is the history of Mother's Day?
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B.C. technology specialist Tris Hussey says people who use unsecured Wi-Fi signals might be sharing personal information.
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Track questions, answer and time spent on these educational games.
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bridge building activity/game
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Social media may have started out as a fun way to connect with friends, but it has evolved to become a powerful tool for education and business. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in new and exciting ways. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list.
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Fantastic virtual whiteboard complete with mathematics manipulatives
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Hard-copy textbooks came one step closer to going the way of the Walkman Wednesday, as calls began for the Toronto District School Board to embrace e-texts and other digital media
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Primary School Safe Search is a great place to start internet sessions for kids / pupils and teachers. Internet searches are filtered and appropriate content is displayed more often than a standard internet search. There are no ads. Search is powered by Google Custom Search.
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Search engine with student appropriate content
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Make an awesome launch page for your daily browsing. A Middlespot mashtab lets you create multiple personalized start pages or topic pages from search results, webpages, files, videos, music, widgets and embed code you collect. Mash up your collection in a unique visual environment that lets you pan, zoom, group and drag, and even share it with others
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An encyclopedia up to date now.
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A new blog post from the Twitter media team suggests that the company will launch an embeddable tweets feature sometime tomorrow.
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Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users
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HTML5 is the latest iteration of this lingua franca. While it is the most ambitious change to our common tongue, this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The language has been evolving from the start.
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Info graphic outlining why we hate printers!
A Nice Holding Place
I was first introduced to Instapaper when I noticed it as one of the features of the Twittelator iPod Twitter client. It has since then become an integral part of my internet reading routine.
It’s a very simple concept and yet it serves my need so nicely. I’m on the internet or Twitter and find a link or a resource that looks interesting. However, for one reason or another, it’s not practical to read it in its entirety. For permanency, I do send the best of what I read to Diigo and then on to Delicious. But, that’s only after I’ve previewed it and determined that it’s worth remembering. Or, the other frequent scenario is that I’m reading a message from someone I follow on Twitter or I’m just visiting a webpage on my iPod and need to view it later full screen.
Instapaper to the rescue.
I’ll just send the resource to Instapaper and read it at a more convenient time or location.
The mechanics are pretty easy. In my web browsers, I just have dragged a bookmarklet to my bookmark bar. When I find a website that I want to review later, I just click on it. Inside Twittelater, it’s the same concept. Click the action button and "Add to Instapaper" is one of my options. Great!
Then, when I get a few quiet moments to review things, I log in to Instapaper and I have all this research ready to go. The links are there and I can preview them all in a single sitting. Once visited, they’re archived for good. However, the best of the best are posted to my public bookmark accounts and then scraped to my blog so that I can share them with whoever cares to look.
An additional feature, should I insist on reading a webpage on the iPod, is found in the Instapaper text engine. This engine strips away the eye candy and just leaves the text which is far easier to handle on the portable device.
In the classroom, I think something like Instapaper could be used very effectively in a couple of ways. Create an account (passwords are optional) and quickly bookmark reading for students. Send them to the Instapaper account for a quick subject research tool. Or, on the student end, as they are collecting their resources from all over, use Instapaper as a quick and easy way to store the results of the search. It’s so easy, and with so many students having their own portable devices, it’s the perfect web research scrapboarding tool.
In so many ways, Instapaper is just such a nice holding place.
