Month: November 2012

Listening to playlists on YouTube is a great way to check out new music for free, but you have to keep your browser open and you have to watch a bunch of ads. If you’d like a cleaner experience, tech blog Digital Inspiration shows how to play playlists in the VLC media player.

Despite the name, Google Type isn’t a real Google product. The site generates fonts based on Google image search, hence the name. You type in words, the site digs through image search and regenerates your text using image versions of each letter.

This is all based on an interesting quirk of Google’s image search. If you type in a single letter and search images, Google gives you a lovely collection of image representations for that letter. For example, plug in “Y,” and you may see the “Y” from “Yahoo,” an illustration of a guy with his arms up in a “Y” shape, and a hand making the hang-loose sign. Any of these could pop up in Google Type.

So you want to create a digital magazine for your students but still did not find the right web tools to do so. Well now you can .  we have just finished reviewing some great web services that you can use with your students to create and publish highly customizable magazines and newspapers  for  your class.

If we’re to believe much of the mainstream press, then video games are little more than a plague upon our youth, a disease that turns delightful, law-abiding young citizens into diabetes-ridden, sociopathic adolescents without a firm grip on reality. That’s not to make light of such issues, but to lay the blame solely on games is to be as ignorant as those who claimed rock-and-roll would be the downfall of society, or that TV would result in a generation of brain dead morons; the Stones are still rocking, and Jersey Shore is classed as entertainment, but we’ve not reached Ayn Rand levels of dystopia just yet.

Google Docs is convenient, cheap, and compatible with just about any platform, making collaboration incredibly simple. It???s also infuriating, incomplete, and limited. Google Docs wafts in the cloud, just beyond your tinkering fingertips, and you???re at the whim of the Google engineers who control the tweaks, fixes, and enhancements.

Since launching Google Spreadsheets in 2006, Google has steadily improved Docs to support complex text documents, worksheets, tables, forms, and presentations. You might have to wait for its software wizards to make the big changes, but you can still apply a few workarounds and hidden features. Want to trim the number of Google Docs browser tabs? Compensate for the lack of a guided spelling checker? Create shortcuts for frequently used text? To make your overall editing experience a bit better, read on; we also offer some tips that you can use with Google???s spreadsheet and presentation applications.

The human mind is a funny thing; it likes to play tricks on us.

For example, when we proofread and edit our own writing, we tend to read it as we think it should be, which means we misread our own typos and other spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes as well as problems with word choice and sentence structure, context, and overall readability.

If you have a friend or family member who has good grammar skills, maybe they can help you out by proofreading and editing your work before you send it out or publish it.

For special submissions and publications, hiring a professional proofreader or editor is the best way to make sure your writing is free of errors.

But for most of us, it???s not likely that anyone???s going to proofread and edit every single piece of writing that we create. That???s especially true for writers who put out a lot of material ??? like bloggers, copywriters, and freelancers. Proofreading and editing services can get expensive and friends and family probably don???t want to spend all their evenings checking your work.

Recent education headlines express the dilemma currently facing UK higher education. The Council for the Defence of British Universities launched last week promoting a vision of education for education’s sake, with universities as centres of learning in danger of being shackled by short-term performance measures and funding models. On the same day, the Engineers Employers’ Federation (EEF) called for a closer alignment of the education and training system ??? including higher education ??? with the needs of the labour market and employers.

Are universities a key pipeline in the nation’s skills supply route? Should they be pursuing academic excellence and scholarly enquiry, or fulfilling more prosaic but economically valuable goals? Could they do both? These questions will be at the heart of next week’s Institute for Employment Studies (IES) conference as part of a discussion of the wider role of higher education and the ways it might meet employer demand for high-level skills.

Tablets are poised to become one of the most revolutionary education tools in a generation. They have streamlined various aspects of education in such a way that we couldn???t imagine just ten years ago, causing many parents and educators to reevaluate the old textbook and notepad standards.

Children and college students alike respond to the interactivity of learning material on tablets in the form of free and modestly priced educational apps. The iPad in particular has many engaging and informative apps for those who want to incorporate tablet usage into their lesson plan. Here are 5 of my favorites.

Did you know that Google offers a sortable library of lesson plans that are free to download and use? It???s part of the company???s big push into education (seems to be quite the trend these days) and involves thousands of free lesson plans just waiting for you to try out.

Most incorporate Google products but then again so do most high-tech lesson plans these days. You can sort the listings by the type of Google product you want or, if that???s not your cup of tea, view the plans organized by subject.