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Showing posts from October, 2013

5 Reasons iWork for iCloud is no Google Drive iKiller, Yet

On Tuesday Apple had a little product announcement that made the bloggosphere ‘ splode with excitement. The most interesting part for me as fully committed Google Drive fan-middle-aged-man is the iWork for iCloud beta announcement. Like Google Drive, the iWork suite is now free, and like Google Drive, it offers real-time collaboration. Sorry Microsoft SkyDrive 365 Office Sharepoint. If you don’t give your software away now, you’re in even bigger trouble. Last night on The Google Educast , Sean, Fred, and I put iWork collaboration to the test, and it actually kind of works. Here Sean is trying to get a rise out of me. Here are five reasons I think iWork for iCloud is not a Google Drive iKiller . 1. No collaborator cursor. I can't tell who is typing what. Without the cursor, words appear out of nowhere and I can't tell where my colleagues are working. Confusing. 2. No authentication. All of these docs are shared essentially as "anyone with the link can

I'm Glad Google Reader is Gone

Last year I used Google Reader to keep track of all of my students' #20time blogs. I created folders sorted by section number and last name. Now Google Reader is gone, and I couldn't be happier. Let's back up to CUE Rockstar Tahoe where my love affair with a post Google Reader began. One of the greatest parts of CUE Rockstar is the two-hour lunch. These lunches that allow for extreme collaboration may be the single most valuable parts of Rockstar events. One day I got to spend almost two hours brainstorming with Alice Chen about 20% Time. We talked about how we manage the blogs we assign with our projects. I told her that I was sad about Google Reader going away, and I thought I would create a form for students to fill out that would link to their most current posts. Chen, in her usual brilliance suggested that I include a paragraph textbox so students would paste the written content of the blog into the form itself. The result: all of my students' blog posts for

Twitter serves 80% of my LMS needs, quickly

If new technology doesn't simplify your life, change it or dump it. A little over a year ago our school switched from Moodle to Haiku for our LMS program. I'm really happy with Haiku, and I think many of our teachers are seeing the benefits. The assessments and gradebooks  have saved me a lot of time, and I love how well they're all integrated. However, Haiku has one fatal flaw. It's slow. I. Mean. Slow. When I am building an assessment or managing my grades, I don't mind the time it takes for Haiku to authenticate me. That time is saved later. It's worth it. But 80% of my LMS work is simply sharing links of docs, forms, quizlet  decks, announcements, tasks, and questions. I hate spending time signing in to Haiku to make a simple announcement. Last year at Fall CUE, I attended Lisa Highfill's workshop on flipping the classroom. I'm a flipper myself, but I knew I would be able to learn something new and awesome from Lisa because every time I see he