Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Month: August 2012

  • CDR Electronics in Oklahoma City: A GREAT Place to Buy Used iOS Devices & Macs

    I owe Adam Zodrow a big debt of gratitude: Last week he told me about CDR Electronics in Oklahoma City. Thanks to that bit of Macintosh-related intel, I was able to purchase a 4th generation, 64 GB iPod today for $230. The same iPod sold new from Apple costs $400. I think I got a…

  • Turn off Automatic iPhone Backups in iTunes with DiskAid

    Backing up computers, including mobile devices like iPhones, iPod and iPads, is very important. USB 2.0 transfer speeds can feel excruciatingly slow, however, when syncing iOS devices with hundreds of megabytes of apps and media files. For this reason, I like to SELECTIVELY backup my iPhone when I manually sync it to iTunes. In the…

  • Handwriting Resource Websites

    (cross-posted from Instructional FAQs for Yukon Public Schools) Are you teaching handwriting, or are teachers you know in your school district teaching it? If so, here are some helpful websites that can help with handwriting. Kathy Davis, who is the Curriculum Director for Yukon Public Schools in Oklahoma, shared these recently in an email to…

  • Internet Resources for our District Internet Cafe PD Activity

    For a professional development day next month in our school district, our curriculum director is organizing an “Internet Cafe” activity. We’re using a collaborative Google Spreadsheet to brainstorm outstanding resource websites which directly address different content areas. Here are a few of the sites I added to the spreadsheet today. Math http://mathtrain.tv Elementary school video…

  • Florida FCAT Cut Score Lesson: High Stakes Accountability is About Politics Not Learning

    Don’t believe the hype and the lies: High stakes accountability in our schools is not about improving student achievement, helping students, or improving outcomes for families living in our communities. High stakes testing has always been since its inception, and continues to be, a campaign by politicians ill-informed about education and learning to obtain and…

  • Send Web Articles to Kindle from an iPhone with Readability

    Readability is an outstanding, free web-service and mobile app for iOS and Android which permits users to read advertisement-free web content offline on multiple devices. In this post, I’ll describe how to use Readability to send a web article you want to read later to your Kindle eReader. Hat tip to Bob Sprankle who first…

  • Updated Media Product Names for Mapping Media to the Common Core

    This week I’ve been working on updating several of the “product names” for my Mapping Media to the Common Core / Curriculum website and forthcoming eBook. I made changes to six of the twelve products: Blogging is now “Interactive Writing” (so it can include Google Docs too) Concept Map is now “Visual Notetaking” (I created…

  • Jonah Lehrer, Integrity and Quotation Fabrication: A Case Study in Writing Ethics

    I was shocked and disappointed today to learn, thanks to a conversation with David Burkus, that acclaimed “brain science” author and creativity expert Jonah Lehrer has admitted to fabricating many of the quotations attributed to Bob Dylan in his New York Times bestselling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” The book has been pulled by his…

  • Cross-Posting Audio Podcasts & Phonecasts from Cinch to iPadio

    (Cross-posted from PlayingWithMedia.com) From time to time, a useful media sharing website closes its doors to users. That was the case with Gabcast.com, a free phonecasting service used by the instructor whose classes I studied for my dissertation. Cinch.fm has been one of my favorite “no-edit podcasting” as well as phonecasting services, and this past…

  • Working Behind a Filter: Resolve Shortened URLs with Unshort.me

    (Cross-posted from Balanced Filtering in Schools) It’s “back to school” time for many school districts in North America, and for many teachers (like me) this means “back to working behind an Internet content filter” for a large percentage of the working week. Even when you’re fortunate to work for or with a school district which…