This is the trailer for the new game being released this September:
Author Archives: admin
Outlook.com now has over 10 million users
Wow, in just two weeks, 10 million users. This is something to keep a watch on: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/14/outlook-com-hits-10-million-users-in-just-two-weeks/
If you remember, I posted about this 2 weeks ago HERE when they got 1 million users in the first 6 hours. So it appears they are growing quite a bit.
Why men are choosing not to be K-12 Teachers
I saw this article posted on USATODAY this morning. Its an opinion piece but it attempts to address a very important issue we are seeing in K-12 education right now: Boys are not doing well in school and have do not have role models in school because there are not men in schools.
As this article notes:
“…boys in particular benefit from the presence of male role models in the classroom. As Stanford University professor Thomas Dee has documented, in a study of more than 20,000 middle-school students, boys perform better when they have a male teacher, and girls perform better when they have a female teacher. If we want to do something about boys’ often sluggish classroom performance, more male teachers could be a useful step.” Source
While this article addresses some other issues as well and not all that I agree with, we do agree that more men are needed in K-12 education. Women are outperforming men in school by leaps and bounds. While this is great and we need to continue to do more to keep our girls performing well, we need to also start doing things to help our boys do well too. One of those is getting more men into schools. I have heard all kinds of stats but in elementary schools it seems like there is 1 male teacher for every 10 female (sometimes even more like 1 to 15). I have seen this first hand. I teach one undergraduate technology for education class and every semester there are 20 girls and maybe 1-3 guys. Some classes have no guys. Guys are not going into teaching. Why?
Well here is the main reason I would not go into K-12 education: low pay (there are others but if this happened I believe the others would be solved or at least we would going in the right direction). If you pay teachers 15k-30k to start, who is going to want to do it? Yes, I see my students getting offers for less than 20k a year to start. Heck my first job out of college was 50k with full benefits+401k in the corporate world. I was making 65k after 1 year out in the corporate world and over the course of a few more years my salary was significantly higher than that. The average teacher makes 46k a year at retirement in the US (source). How are you going to get the best by paying 46k a year? I dont even think I could pay rent on that better yet support a family, and that is the national average in retirement. Sure there are some districts around cities that pay teachers upwards of 100k, but that is not normal and not close to the national average. I often hear, well teachers get summer off. Sure they get 8 weeks of unpaid vacation. Guess what? I got 3-5 weeks of paid vacation at my various jobs. Yep, when I left the corporate world and went into higher education I had 5 weeks of paid vacation a year so that extra 3 weeks that teachers had was nothing special considering it was unpaid. You want men, pay for them. Here is a video that addresses this issue much better than I can:
Xbox 720 sold on Ebay for $20,100???
It appears that someone who claims to have a development kit for the next xbox sold it on ebay and it went for over 20k.
Here is the link but keep in mind this will disappear in a few days so I am taking a screen shot as well.
So is this real? No one knows. If it is, this person will probably get in trouble because MS knows who has these. Unless of course it is a publicity stunt by MS, which in my opinion is pure genius.
Click image to see full size:
If I get more info, i will post. I really wonder who this buyer was? Was a prototype of the next xbox worth 20k?
What is the best eLearning software?
The right answer is? The best software that allows you to deliver your learning objectives using the desired instructional strategy. However, that is not the answer I usually hear not the answer people usually want. Instead I hear Articulate, Captivate, Flash, Lectora, etc etc. The truth is that there is not one tool that does it all…well actually there is, its called programming but that is usually the least cost effective way to go so we do not do it. One of the big issues I am seeing in our field is that people are only familiar with a few tools and really believe that those few tools can do everything. The problem is that many of those tools are very limited. For instance, if an instructional designer cannot tell me why I would choose Flash over Articulate or vice versa, I would be concerned that they do not understand some of the basic authoring tools that are available because there are situations when I would choose one of those over another. They each have distinct advantages over one another.
Another big issue I see is that designers are many times playing the role of a developer so they can only use simple development tools because they are not programmers. So the training is limited to a drag and drop development tool. If you have an instructional design team, you need a developer. You need someone dedicated to development…otherwise you are a very small company and you are not going to be competitive with the big boys because they have developers that can develop full simulation environments. If I see a company/person saying they can develop effective training using X tool without seeing my needs, objectives, etc. then I get very concerned with quality and ability to deliver effective training. You choose your tool that best fits the design. You do not make your design fit a tool. A good instructional design company will be able to use any tool that fits your needs, whether it be simple like PPT or Articulate or advanced like Unity 3D game engine.
So what are the problems with all of this? The biggest in my opinion is boring training, training that is not effective, and/or instructional strategies that are limited by software. The two big issues I hear from executives are that training is not effective or its boring. And I believe poor use of technology is one of the causes.
GLTC Presentation: Building mobile apps for Android and iOS
Here is my presentation for tomorrow’s GLTC conference
GLTC Workshop: Web 2.0 for educators
Here is the presentation I will use for tomorrow’s workshop at the GLTC conference
Pixlr O Matic: Add instagram like effects to photos from your computer
Pixlr is a free photo editing website that I have been using for years to edit photos as its very similar to photoshop. I have been showing it to my classes and really like the tool. Now they have a program called Pixlr O Matic which allows you to create instagram like effects to photos from your home computer. They also have created an android and ios app that is very similar to instagram, better in my opinion. Here is a link to their website: http://pixlr.com/
Here is a video that demonstrates this tool:
iPhone and iPad getting rid of youtube? Not really
Tons of headlines floating around the web yesterday included “youtube no longer on iOS 6” “youtube done” etc. Well guess what? Youtube will still be on iOS. It just will no longer be pre-installed on it so you will need to download the app the from the app store. So, you will now need to go into iTunes App Store and download Google’s youtube app.
Now what was the cause of all the headlines? Well to those who understand the google/apple rival we know that apple lost the the license to keep putting youtube pre installed on their OS. Whether google refused to renew or apple chose not to renew is something only they know at this point. Either way, everyone still gets youtube.