Helping Students Create Positive Digital Footprints - ASCD Annual Conference 2012 Christine Fisher When asked what words come to mind when they think about students posting to the Internet, many educators list words like danger and safety. But with the likes of Robert Nay—who created one of the most downloaded iPad apps of 2011 when he was just 14—and even Justin Bieber—who began his international superstardom as a YouTube sensation—as inspiration, students and teachers alike should know the positives that posting to the Internet can offer. This was the message Steve Johnson, a technology skills teacher, parent, and author of two education books, shared during his Saturday session, "Digital Footprints: Your Students' New First Impression." "The main idea we get from surveying teachers [about students posting online] is there [are] a lot of negative connotations," Johnson said, as he aimed to reverse these negative perceptions and encourage educators to promote student-produced online content in their classrooms. "They are going to make mistakes," he said.
Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it's possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you'd rather keep secret. As we've covered in the past, a brain-computer interface is a two-part device: There's the hardware -- which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp -- and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you're trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) Both of these commercial BCIs have an API -- an interface that allows developers to use the BCI's output in their own programs. Moving forward, this brain hack can only improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper, more accurate, and thus more extensively used.
Reaching 10M Downloads, And The Guerrilla Marketing Tactics We Used To Get There The day my app (AutoCAD WS) crossed one million downloads on the App Store, the first question that crossed my mind was how did I ever end up doing marketing? I was a techy product manager and never imagined myself in marketing, until my app was in a life or death situation. The startup I co-founded (which was later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B app for engineers. After launching our product, we started marketing it by the book – crafting our positioning and working with a PR agency to approach bloggers. This didn’t work. We went at it a second and third time – tweaking our positioning and web site once again, adding more product features and writing to more bloggers. I gradually came to an understanding that when competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps for attention, marketing is not just another ingredient in an app’s success. Here are some non-traditional tactics that helped us get there. The first big marketing step for a vertical app to admit that it is one.
10 Things Your Students Should Know About Their Digital Footprints Building a digital legacy is an issue I believe doesn’t garner enough attention in our personal and professional lives. In fact, some of the heaviest users of online tools and social media are our young students, who are growing up as a generation of visual learners and visual attention seekers. This is in fact the Facebook and YouTube generation, and the reality is that many teens are unconcerned about the dangers of sharing personal information online. A highly respected education advocate, Kevin Honeycutt, once asked me if any of us from our generation (GenX and before), had ever made a mistake in puberty. He then asked if our mistakes are “Googleable.” The reality is that our mistakes from puberty are not “Googleable”. With that in mind, I have developed some important facts and opinions that our students should be completely aware of as they live in their digital world, creating digital footprints along the way. 10 Things Your Students Should Know About Their Digital Footprints 1. 2.
How School Librarians Can Assist You:Internet Safety and Filtering Insafe, a network of national nodes that coordinate Internet safety awareness in Europe makes the case for empowerment as the key to online safety. Safety risks are increased …”in the online environment by the fact that we can’t usually see whom we are communicating with, probably don’t know who provided the data we are accessing, and online content comes without any quality assurance from a reputable publisher or editor. In order to compensate for this, we need to develop our information literacy skills and behave in a more discriminating manner when online.” The following resources for parents should help you to better understand the complexities of the online environment and provide you with the tools to keep your child safe when online. Bullying.org Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU) This site hopes to mobilize educators, parents, students, and others to combat online social aggression. Children's Internet Protection Act CyberSmart! CyberSmart! Digizen.org InSafe
Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data.
APIs - US Census Bureau To improve access to data and encourage innovation, the Census Bureau has begun to provide API access to some data sets. We invite developers to use these APIs, join our Developer Forum, and provide feedback to help us move forward with continued API development. Please read the Terms of Service for using the API. Now available: The Economic Indicators Time Series Database - see details The Economic Indicator Database is now available via the API. Discovery Tool (in Beta) The machine-readable dataset discovery service is now available in beta release. In addition to the above URIs dataset discovery is available for the entire vintage/dataset hierarchy as well. The Open Project Data Common Core Metadata Schema documentation is a good starting point for understanding the fields output by the discovery service. This is a beta release. Happy discovering! Accessing Data Data are accessible to software developers through a stateless HTTP GET request. Query Response
Cyberbullying What does cyberbullying look like? Children can cyberbully each other in a number of ways including: abusive texts and emails hurtful messages, images or videos imitating others online excluding others online nasty online gossip and chat Cyberbullying can happen to anyone, however often the children involved in cyberbullying are also involved in other kinds of bullying. Cyberbullying is the use of technology to bully a person or group. Cyberbullying can involve social, psychological and even, in extreme cases, physical harm. Because children and young people are often online it can be hard for them to escape cyberbullying. How teachers can help Research shows students often don’t tell adults about cyberbullying. Responding to cyberbullying If you notice a child in your class or the school yard showing any of the above signs, or other worrying and out of character behaviours, tell them you are worried and want to help. Safe schools address cyberbullying before it happens >Useful websites
Dropbox in Space! Dropbox / 18 Comments Posted by Drew Houstonon April 09, 2014 Today, we launched Mailbox for Android, turned on new Dropbox for Business features, and introduced the world to Carousel, our new gallery app. These experiences are just a first step towards making Dropbox a home for life. And today, we’re thrilled to announce three amazing additions to our leadership team to help us get there. We’re thrilled to promote Sujay Jaswa to be our CFO. Dennis Woodside is joining the Dropbox family as our new COO. Finally, we’re proud to welcome Dr. Welcome aboard! Dropbox / 56 Comments Posted by Drew and Arashon April 09, 2014 Technology should ‘just work’ and make us happy. If you’re using Dropbox at work, you can now connect your personal Dropbox to your Dropbox for Business on all your devices. Mailbox was the first new addition to the Dropbox family, and for the last year it’s helped iOS users put email in its place. Dropbox / 45 Comments Posted by Ramesh Balakrishnan & Chris Leeon April 09, 2014
MobileDay - One-Touch into any conference call from your iPhone or Android