An interesting article in the Scientific American (April 2013) written by David Pogue. He points out that more pixels, e.g. the iPad which is marketed as having the best display, does not necessarily mean sharper images. The point is made that web images not optimised for retina display look worse, and if the resolution were to be increased the size would increase commensurate to the resolution and bang goes your internet quota for the month within a few days.
I have been irresolute as to which tablet to buy. This certainly has swayed me away from insisting on as many pixels as possible!
Read Disappointment of Dazzling Displays (pdf)
MS Word 2010 introduced a few changes from previous versions and if you are a typographical addict you should be pleased with the new option to use ligatures with OpenType fonts.
Below is a screenshot of the options available for font formatting in MS Word 2007 (and iterations of the program before that):
Compare that to the new tab “Advanced” and the new section called “OpenType Features” in the same dialog box in MS Word 2010:
If this is something that interests you, the How-To Geek has a good article to get you started.
If you, like many users of Word, have been taken off the list St Peter has for potential candidates that may enter the pearly gates because of your images misbehaving in Word, then Shauna Kelly explains why pretty clearly.
I especially like her description of what you experience when you try to tame the positioning of that image:
- If you have to press Enter Enter Enter Enter like a deranged Morse code operator to insert some text after an image, it’s because the image is floating, and it should be in line.
- If an image slides around the page like a junior marketing executive at the office Christmas party, it’s because the image is floating, and it should be in line.
Quite a good blog if you want to know why Word behaves erratically at times. Usually it’s because of something you did (or didn’t) do!
This article on using iPods at schools from the NY Times dates back to 2007 — and I especially like the comment that not one iPod was damaged or stolen by the end of the school day. And a school in Boston hands out Apple laptops to the pupils each day — and there are no textbooks. Wonder how they are doing after two years?
For those of you who are on Facebook beware of nefarious descriptions of the little darlings you teach. It may lose you the job you find so fulfilling!
The Educause Learning Initiative white paper on mobile learning includes links to the resources of a focus session on this topic held in March 2010. This may provide some thought-provoking ideas for the assignment on which you are working at the moment.
So here I’m working on a presentation and fiddling with trying to get the text to wrap around an image in Powerpoint. This is basic stuff, yes? Oh no, it’s not. Check out the really simple way in which you do this:
Wrap text around an image easily in Powerpoint
A whole page dedicated to explaining this on Microsoft’s site — as well as how to use spacebar, tab and enter when you have an irregular image. Brilliant stuff this.
Finally, I also know how to blog!
Redi Direko had an interview with the Minister of Basic Education on her show yesterday. You can download the podcast but do it in the next week or so if you are interested, because the 702 podcasts are taken off after a month.
The South African Council of Educators is proposing a number of ways in which to “ensure” the professional development of teachers. Have a look at the content of the IQMS Professional Development Workshop available as a pdf from their site.
The idea seems to be that each teacher accumulate a certain number of “PD points” through a variety of ways mentioned in the above document. Not so clear is exactly how these activities are to be weighted, what range of activities will be required (one can seemingly get points for reading a subject-related article) and what kind of consultation process has been followed to ensure that teachers buy into this concept.
I tentatively support such a requirement, because we all know teachers who are quite happy never to go beyond that which they already know, but unless it is implemented without the imperatives that generally emanate from official sources, I suspect that teachers will treat it with disdain and the whole exercise will become one of pushing papers for the benefit of officials “from the Department”. And it will die a quiet death!
Now why do I mention this on the HyLL blog? Because most of you are educators and SACE is the professional body to which you are affiliated. And this course puts you way up there, not only in being professionally developed, but also as potential developers yourselves. You are acquiring sought-after skills that can benefit not only your own learners but your colleagues too.
If you are interested, one of the second year HyLL students has created a support site for Grade 12 literature in Moodle as part of her thesis. The site is called “Read for Fun Clubhouse” and you are invited to visit it. Marinda will tell you more about her research at the seminar, but in the meantime why not have a look at what can be done in Moodle?
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