My 14 year old son is really into the online world / game simulation Minecraft. My Mac laptop is our only home computer with adequate RAM and processor speed to run the program, so he’s regularly competing with me these days for laptop screen time. This month I’ve installed a new (and larger) hard drive
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My kids and I recorded this 21.5 minute audio podcast on an iPad today during the last leg of our car trip back to Oklahoma from California, discussing tips for winning the game, “Plants Versus Zombies.” This is currently one of our favorite games to play on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Enjoy and
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Since our family shares a common iTunes library on an external hard drive which isn’t always plugged into a computer, we don’t sync our iOS devices on a weekly basis. This evening as I downloaded app updates (about 79 of them, wow!) and did some routine updates as well as backups, I noticed the latest
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Wednesday in Oklahoma City at the “iOS Apps for Productivity and Fun” workshop, 7 year old Rachel taught participants about one of her favorite math applications for her iPod Touch, “Stickershop.” I recorded her presentation which was shared over Ustream.tv, as both a video recording and an audio recording. This is an approximately four minute
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Although you might not guess it at times looking at my computer desktop or my “office area” in our house, I like to be organized. For many months now, however, I’ve been overwhelmed with the large number of applications and screens on my iPad. Since our family shares an iTunes library and all our applications,
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Today at the Creativity World Forum on 17 Nov 2010 in Oklahoma City, I had an opportunity to interview James Gibson at the Lego Store booth. James works at the Oklahoma City Lego Store, and he discussed why Legos are great for encouraging creativity, some things that are special about our Oklahoma City Lego store,
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This is very cool: An iPhone used to control an interactive game played on a HD television connected to an iPad. It’s hard to believe this game (“The Incident“) is $1.99. (Of course you DO need a $500+ iPad, a $150+ iPhone, and a HD television of uncertain cost…) Still, there’s a big difference here
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Today in my “Computers in the Classroom” course at the University of North Texas, we reviewed the PI4BL chapter “Redefining the Beginner.” One of the things I learned last semester, teaching “Technology 4 Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma, was NOT to assume things about students’ background knowledge and entering computer literacy skills. This
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This evening I asked my three children, ages 6, 10 and almost 13, to create their personal “top 10 lists” for their favorite iOS applications. Here are their lists, which I’ve curated as linked lists on Appolicious, starting from youngest to oldest. I asked each of them to share a sentence or two about why
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Addition 8/14/2011: CloudBrowse is no longer free, it was at the time I wrote this post initially. It’s now a $3 app. If there’s one thing my children have lamented more than any other when it comes to iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad technologies, it’s the lack of support for Adobe’s Flash technology. Club Penguin
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This podcast from the road features an interview with 12 year old Alexander, who discusses several of his favorite applications and games for the iPod Touch and iPhone. These include InstaPaper, Pandora’s Box, Doodle Jump, F.A.S.T., Civilization Revolution, A Doodle Fly, Angry Birds, Eliminate Pro, and Bloons TD. Alexander shared a summary of each application,
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Podcast342: A 12 Year Old's Favorite iPod Touch / iPhone Games (March 2010) [ 19:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2822)
This podcast is a recording of Susan Andrews’ presentation, “Bring Curriculum Alive with SCRATCH” at the 2010 METC Conference. The official program description was: Are your students ready to meet 21st Century skills using a fun, simple and free computer programming language to create curriculum related projects? SCRATCH was designed to allow students to use
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Podcast338: Bring Curriculum Alive with SCRATCH by Susan Andrews and Students [ 40:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3597)
Christopher Stewart’s article, “The Lost Boy” in the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine (not yet available online, apparently) relates horrifying tales of abuse in Chinese “Internet Addiction Camps” for youth. Since 2002 when state-run newspapers started sharing stories about the dangers of Internet addiction, thousands of worried Chinese parents have sent their allegedly Internet-addicted
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This afternoon and evening, my son and I worked on “pruning” down our list of installed applications in our family’s iTunes library. In our family of five we now have four different iTunes accounts, but because we sync our iPhones and iPod Touches to the same Mac running iTunes, we are able to legally share
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These are my notes from a presentation about Creating an alternative gaming classification system at the 21st Century Learning @ the West Lake Expo held Oct 31 – Nov 3, 2009 at Xi Hu, China, also known as West Lake. West Lake is in the center of Hangzhou, China, which is about an hour by
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These are my notes from Milton Chen’s presentation, “The Digital Generation: Up Close and Personal” at the 21st Century Learning @ the West Lake Expo held Oct 31 – Nov 3, 2009 at Xi Hu, China, also known as West Lake. West Lake is in the center of Hangzhou, China, which is about an hour
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The complexities of running a living room television set have really increased in the past few years. How many different video and audio sources do you now route through your television and living room entertainment center, if you have one? For us, the list has grown to include a DVD player, a computer (mainly for
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If you’re a Twitter user, chances are fairly good you’ve seen at least one message in the past month (or maybe lots more) inviting you join someone’s “Mafia family.” What are these strange and unwanted messages? According to Kern Kelly, who I visited with this evening following the ACTEM 09 banquet, some messages like this
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The popular online destination for kids, Webkinz, drives continued revenue by granting Webkinz pet purchasers a limited access license to the online Webkinz world. My son received the following in-world message in Webkinz recently: Account Renewal Reminder: 30 days: This note is just a reminder that your account is set to expire in 30 days
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This podcast features an interview with 11 year old Alexander, discussing his experiences playing the iPod Touch / iPhone version of the game Civilization Revolution. According to the English WikiPedia entry for the game: Civilization Revolution is a turn based strategy game. In past installments the player had more control over the rules of the
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Podcast329: Playing Civilization Revolution on the iPod Touch / iPhone [ 31:10 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3269)
