Month: September 2011

Educators who???ve been wanting to use YouTube videos in class can now find an easy way in. Today, YouTube launched its own teacher???s channel: YouTube.com/Teachers, a guide to using videos in class.

Teachers can follow tips that show everything from organizing videos to sparking lively discussions to help struggling students through videos.

Teachers can also sign up to become part of the YouTube Teachers Community, a mailing list that allows them to share ideas and best practices.

When you’re just starting out managing your own finances, little things like paying your own bills, going to the bank, and even grocery shopping “like an adult” can feel empowering. But if you’re reckless and don’t pay attention to money management basics???or just don’t know any better???this is also when you can make the biggest money mistakes of your life. Take it from me, little grasshopper: One of the reasons I have such an interest in personal finance now is that I’ve broken just about every personal finance rule there is???not purposefully or knowingly, but just in the course of being young, foolish, and learning to manage money on my own. If you’re reading this now, you’re probably wiser than I was at the time, but hopefully you can still profit from my experience.

Wouldn’t it be handy if every time someone tagged a photo of you on Facebook, that pic were automatically added to your Dropbox folder? If items you starred in Google Reader were automatically added to Instapaper or Read It Later? Or if you received a text message whenever it was going to rain? If This Then That (ifttt) is a brilliant web service that let’s you plug information from one service into another, allowing you to link all your favorite webapps to create super-charged integration between tools like Gmail, Dropbox, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, and oh-so-much more.

An arms race between instructors and students continues to escalate.

The prized ammunition? Plagiarism detection software.

Turnitin, plagiarism software released in 1996 and used by more than 10,000 universities and 20 million students, is now common in higher education. The popular system checks submitted papers against its catalog of millions of archived student papers, journals, periodicals and books, producing a “similarity index” that alerts professors to the percentage of corresponding work found in its database.

• STORY: Cheating and the generational divide

• STORY: Finding applicants who plagiarize

But it’s Turnitin’s lesser-known student-only sister product, WriteCheck, that has some faculty members feeling betrayed, although the company says it is only trying to help students and professors.

“They are warlords who are arming both sides in this plagiarism war,” Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, said.

via usatoday.com