Special tech recommendation

I did not intend a Christmas Day post, but my youngest granddaughter received a present I thought deserved recognition.

I have had the opportunity to explore several cameras for young children over the years and all have been disappointing. Inexpensive tech has improved a lot. If the lighting is good, the images this gamera generates should give the child a feeling of accomplishment The camera stores digital images or prints photos. Printing is different from the resurrection of the Polaroid approach which is just too expensive for kids. The Amazon listing for the camera – Instant Print Camera.

Happy holidays

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Top posts of the year


I write in three blogs with different orientations. One blog is intended to offer longer tutorials and comments on edtech issues, one focuses on shorter posts related to edtech issues, and one gives me an opportunity to comment on other topics. The following posts were visited most frequently – it is a strange mix. Most folks access my posts as the result of a search and this method of access influences the type of content that is viewed.

Amish Greenhouse Trip – the most frequent access was to a post I authored several years ago even though I posted on the same topic more recently. The post offers a pictorial and text description of our trip to the Amish Greenhouses in southern Minnesota. This is an example of search access. People want to make this trip to purchase plants for their gardens and I happened to have written one of the few online descriptions of these greenhouses.

Ideas for concurrent teaching – another hot search topic. This one for educators. What do you do when you have some students in person and some students online.

Hotspots for Google slides – I can come up with no easy explanation for the interest in this topic. Maybe it just sounded intriguing. It does describe a hack most folks would not consider.

Interactive media bias chart – a sign of our time. Which news sources are most biased.

Grabe greetings – my message for the holidays. I posted a link from Facebook and I have lots of relatives.

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2021 Book Recommendations

“Best of” posts seem common this time of year. Here are my recommendations of nonfiction books for those I would guess are most likely to read my posts. I understand other sites might be regarded as more influential. Here is something I have decided to add that makes my suggestions unique. I am sharing my highlights for the three books I recommend. The notes and highlights for Kindle books can be saved in Diigo and this content can then be shared from Diigo. There is a limit on the amount of content that will be shared to address copyright issues, but it appears most of what I highlighted is available. 

Sonke Ahrens – How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

Amazon.com: How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning

Diigo Highlights

Bill Gates – How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Diigo Highlights

Christopher Bail – Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

Diigo Highlights

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Drone over my house

I understand the interest in drones. I have a brother who has purchased several drones as a hobby, but despite my interest I just don’t anticipate I would find many uses should I make the investment.

I encountered another example of the use of a drone yesterday and I am trying to figure out just how the application works. We committed to putting solar panels on our home early this year. We are now waiting to see if we are selected for the subsidy in 2022. A representative from the company that will do the work visited our home yesterday to investigate how the connection to the electrical grid would work and to determine exactly where on our roof the panels would be placed. We had a new roof put on this past year because the shingles had some hail damage and you have to remove anything on your roof when adding satellite dishes, solar panes, etc. You don’t want to pay for the installations several times. Evidently, the company that will do the work has decided to use a different panel from the original plan and new measurements were necessary to determine how many of the panels (the new ones are smaller) could be added. To collect the measurements, the technician used a drone.

I have found that people like to talk about their work so the technician was pleased to let me take photographs and talk about his work. If you look closely at the screen on his controller, you can kind of make out two houses with the view of our roof appearing on the right. The technician said that he just had to outline our roof and the drone would then fly in a circular pattern so that multiple images could be taken. The images would be run through some type of analysis program to determine the dimensions of the roof and how much space was available on the part of the roof that was most efficient for collecting energy from the sun. I was trying to imagine just how a program would be able to accurately determine the area of parts of the roof. I would think it would require more information stored with the images. Wouldn’t it be necessary to at least know the height from which images were taken to calculate area from the size of the images that were captured? Pretty cool technology.

For anyone interested in this technology, the technology that does the calculations is called Scanifly.

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Digital is fine, maybe better

There have been recent research studies comparing paper-based and digital processes (reading, note-taking). Those showing a superiority for the paper-based experiences seem to generate the most attention. I hope this isn’t simply a way to legitimate doing things the way they have always been done.

I recently described a study arguing that paper-based note-taking was superior. The argument was that paper-based note-taking was more demanding as those using this approach are slower and this forced them to think more carefully about what they wanted to record. More thoughtful behavior was argued to be beneficial.

I have long endorsed digital note-taking especially in college classes. This is partially based on a personal perspective that values the long-term value of being able to search notes taken and unique applications available in the digital environment such as being able to take notes that are linked to an audio recording. This approach allows a notetaker to listen again should the notes taken be incomplete or confusing.

Here is a recent review of the paper-based and digital note-taking research. This meta-analysis analyzed results from 36 articles comparing digital and longhand note-taking. Overall, the study found no effect for note-taking approach. The authors that while the results of some studies show a benefit for longhand notes this type of outcome may have resulted from the opportunities for distraction associated with the use of a digital device.

Voyer, D., Ronis, S. T., & Byers, N. (2021). The Effect of Notetaking Method on Academic Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 102025.

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Spark is now Express

Educators frequently make use of Adobe Spark rather than the Adobe Creative suite is overpowered and expensive. Today, Adobe announced that the Spark tools would now be available as Adobe Express. The online access to Express is already active and your existing Amazon login will work.

Details about the new service can be found in this story from TechCrunch. For those who liked Spark because there was a free tier, Express will have both a free tier and a paid tier ($10 a month).

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