Category: travel
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Don’t Use an AT&T Phone Overseas Without an International Calling Plan
I’ve been in Brazil for a few days this week leading a 2 day STEM Institute for K-12 teachers at Graded School in Sao Paulo. From my past experiences traveling overseas to China, I know it can be a VERY costly mistake to simply use your cell phone in another country if you don’t arrange…
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Batting 1-1 With Three More Pitches Coming
I’ve been wanting (and perhaps even NEEDING, as other bloggers might be able to understand) to write about our son’s college application journey for a long time. This isn’t just his journey, although it certainly is principally his decision to make and entirely HIS life to live. It’s also a journey for our family, and…
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3 WiFi Hotspots in our Car
It’s Thanksgiving holiday time here in the United States, our family is on a road trip, our son is driving and we have 3 WiFi hotspots active in our car. This is a sign of the times. I’ll explain what functions each hotspot provides in this post. by Wesley Fryer HotSpot 1: iPhone Tethering It’s…
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Podcast426: Civil War History at Harpers Ferry
This podcast features an audio recording of a presentation by U.S. Park Ranger Creighton Waters on July 1, 2015, at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Creighton mainly tells the story of the brief capture of Harpers Ferry in 1862 by Confederate forces led by General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. 12,419 Federal troops surrendered to Jackson, which made this…
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Traveling with Airbnb? Consider Checking Crime Maps First
Last week and this week several members of our family have been and are visiting Philadelphia and Washington D.C. We were in Philly to attend part of the 2015 ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference, and are visiting friends as well as sightseeing in D.C. for the 4th of July weekend. We’ve used…
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Upgrade a Verizon Hotspot for $22 Without a New Contract
Mobile, cellular hotspots can be money pits, but they also can be lifesavers if you’re presenting about educational technology in a location with spotty connectivity or draconian Internet content filtering. After considerable research in the summer of 2012, I opted to start paying $50 per month for 5 GB of wireless data from Verizon. At the time…
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Laptops and iPhones Can Eat Cellular LTE Data FAST
The past two days I’ve been in Tahlequah and Stilwell, Oklahoma, sharing some presentations and providing some coaching/mentoring for teachers at Maryetta School on behalf of Storychasers. I was delighted to find LTE cellular data service through T-Mobile was available in Tahlequah at my hotel. This meant my laptop could access the Internet MUCH faster tethered to my…
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Great Mobile Device Battery Chargers
Last Thursday and Friday my wife and I attended Miami Device, and not surprisingly, we brought a large number of “digital devices” with us to the conference. Shelly brought a Chromebook, iPad and iPhone, while I brought a MacBook Air, iPad, iPhone, and Nexus tablet. If you’ve traveled with members of your family recently, I’m guessing…
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Road Trip Wireless Devices (July 2014) #SignOfTheTimes
According to a Qualcomm infographic published by ArsTechnica in May 2014, in the United States “the average home has 7 connected devices today, that’s predicted to exceed 20 devices by 2020.” If our family was included in that survey sample today, we would definitely inflate the mean. This weekend our family took a 1600 mile…
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GeoMap Comparison of Cellular Data Speeds Between OKC and Dodge City
Sunday afternoon and evening I drove from Oklahoma City to Dodge City, and I noted the cellular data speeds available from T-Mobile on my iPhone5s and from Verizon on my JetPack mobile hotspot on the trip. I used Google Map Engine Lite to create a GeoMap comparing the results. This is the map key /…