Archive for the ‘Technology’ category

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Amazon Cloud Drive

March 29th, 2011


Don’t you know that all the Internet cool kids no longer use the word Internet? It’s now The Cloud, a representation of all the data floating around our heads 24/7.

I use services like Dropbox to have access to my files wherever. I know that there are a ton of applications out there that serve a similar purpose.

Amazon unveiled their Cloud Drive today. My immediate reaction to the news? Lakitu.

Amazon is leasing out server space to store video and music files. You get the first 5GB free and then there’s a subscription per year depending on the size. I can’t imagine spending $1000/year to store 70 hours of HD video, but whatever. An external USB terabyte drive is $70 on Amazon. Sure, it’s not portable and could crash, but come on.

There’s an Amazon Cloud Player phone/web app. No iOS app yet and my guess is that the Amazon digital download store is the next biggest competitor to the Apple store. (Sorry to leave you out, Zune. I’m sure someone thinks you’re cool.) Anything that can be stored on your Cloud Drive can be played on your Cloud Player.

They do include offers like “download an album and get 20GB free for a year”. The amount of sales revenue and advertisement probably balances out any server costs for Amazon. The 5GB is a good idea to get people hooked. I still don’t think I would pay for more space. This is an interesting jump for the future, though. Imagine a 1TB iPod.

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Posted in Technology

3:15 by Patrick Carman

March 25th, 2011

Patrick Carman impresses me with constantly trying to push the ways that traditional paper books interact with digital technology. (See me rant and rave like a fanboy for Skeleton Creek here.)

The new book-ish creation is 3:15, a collection of stories that are in smart phone app format.

So cool!

Here are links to both the Apple and Android app store versions.

I’ll give you my reactions as I experience it:

The app layout looks great and professional, very akin to a Kindle/nook app layout (and what I would expect a Shelfari app to look like if they ever got around to it (hint hint)).

I downloaded the app from the store for free. It then showed me a selection of stories to read. I clicked on the first story and it brought me back to the app store to download it. (I wonder why the download redundancy…) I am appreciative that it doesn’t change too much of my phone’s settings.

Nice. 3:15 is the first app listed on my phone. Yay, alphabetical order!

I like the swiping to change the pages, but I miss the Kindle tap on the side to flip pages. When the phone goes into standby, it messes with where I left off and resets to the first page. A couple of times while I was swiping it scrolled the opposite direction.

There’s also random red letters. I would initially think these were formatting errors, yet I know it’s Patrick Carman and suspect it’s a code.

I got to the end of the story and a video started to automatically load. It had trouble loading; I don’t know if it was my phone that was slow, my network, or other people using server bandwidth for the streaming video.

The Listen Read Watch buttons were a little misleading – I thought I had the option of listening to the story or reading it. The buttons are more of a progression, not nonlinear options.

The story is great, an eerie tale of a delivery boy tasked with carrying out a dying man’s final wish. The boy does not and… I don’t know what happens next because the video won’t load. Buried Treasure is the free story, so I wonder if the ones you pay for load better.

Video took a while, but is SO worth it. Very professional film quality. Nicely done, PC Studios!

Obviously this is brand new and I’m excited for what Patrick Carman has to offer. I’m sure the glitches in the app will work themselves out. (Well, the software techs will work them out. We don’t want a Ghost in the Machine, right?) The key is that the writing is solid and enjoyable.

The first story is written by Paul Chandler, author of Peeper. 3:15 looks to be a promising short story anthology. One is A Night on the Dredge. Fun stuff.

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Posted in Patrick Carman, Suspense, Technology

Using the HJHS Databases

February 3rd, 2011

I put a handout online for how to log into the library site and access the Biography Reference Center and Student Research Center. Click here to view the instructions in PDF format.

Here are the instructions without the screenshots:

  1. Go to http://destiny1.gilbertschools.net .
  2. Click on ‘Highland Junior High’.
  3. Log in by clicking in the top-right corner.
    Your login name is 8 characters long. Your password is 9 numbers long.
    (Add zeroes to your ID number to make it 9 numbers long.)
  4. Click on the ‘Databases’ button.
  5. Choose either ‘Biography Reference Center’ or ‘Student Research Center’, depending on what you need to look up.

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Posted in Reference, Technology

The Tricky Power of hiybbprqag

February 2nd, 2011

Microsoft is taking some criticism after a “Bing Sting” operation from Google. Google employees typed in nonsensical words like “hiybbprqag” into Google searches in Internet Explorer. The browser recorded their searches, even to which results users clicked on the most, and prioritized Bing’s results based on another company’s data.

Now, those Google results are out there for the public to see. Is it unethical to use someone else’s work and put your name on it? In some circles it’s called “plagiarism”. I know that when I post articles on this site, there are other sites who have an RSS feed set up to auto-post what I said and call it their own content. Yeah. Annoying.

So, Microsoft’s defense is that using Google results to fuel Bing is just a part of their clickstream data mining technique. Users opt-in for their actions to be recorded anonymously and used by the company to improve the computing experience. It helps us, the people doing the searches, as long as it is evaluating the frequency of hits in Google compared to other sources. But did you stop to think what opting in actually meant?

All I know is that now “hiybbprqag” brings up results about the Google vs. Microsoft conflict.

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Posted in Technology

Two indie nooks in one day.

February 1st, 2011

Today two different teachers wanted me to track down books that were read on the nook. Both books were self-published, one at Smashwords and the other at Lulu.com. Both were free. Of course, there were no AR tests or anything like that, but I think it may be a sign of the changing dynamic of publishing that people are asking for self-published ebooks at a junior high library.

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Posted in Technology

National Robotics League – Arizona

January 31st, 2011

Our students competed in the BattleBots tournament this weekend and the NRL has put the video online. You can watch it by clicking here. We’re the only junior high that competes. Everyone else is older.

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Posted in Technology

I Like Big Binders

January 24th, 2011

Ms. Johnson, 7th grade AVID instructor, shared with me this great video emphasizing the benefit of a big binder:

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Posted in Philosophy, Technology

The mathematical odds for “2 things” is astounding.

November 18th, 2010


Play the Twilight Zone theme.

Today I received two e-mails from two different people. They were next to each other in the list of messages and both had the subject header “2 things”, both spelled the same way. And they both were on an even hour sent six minutes into the hour. On top of that, they weren’t SPAM.

Weird.

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Posted in Administrative, Technology

Quality of Work vs. Time Allowed: A Very Official Study

October 22nd, 2010


Diagram 1 – Very Official

This is my fourth year as librarian and previous to that I spent five years teaching Language Arts. In both frameworks I facilitated technology projects with students. This week I’ve observed some great teaching with two Science teachers. One thing that I noticed is that they allotted the perfect amount of time for their students to finish creating iMovies.

When working with technology, you’ve got to find that balance of giving students enough time to explore the program and troubleshoot errors, but if you give them too much time, they’ll tinker until the project starts to decrease in quality (the “Hey! We Need Squirrels in our Planet Reports!” Effect). This balance between not enough and too much time can be discovered through practice over the years doing the same project, tweaking it to meet student needs and standards.

Another way to find the balance is to break down the large parts of the project into tiny, more manageable chunks. That’s what these two teachers have done masterfully and is what I recommend for others, especially when tackling technology. It’s something that sounds like common sense, but you’d be surprised how tempting it is to give the students too much time for tech.

Granted, all this depends on students paying attention and working when they’re supposed to. I’ve seen that when you give them enough instructions to be confident to start working, but also let them know that time is limited, they usually do a good job of meeting your professional expectations.

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Posted in Philosophy, Technology

Athletic Propulsion Labs and the psychology of shoes

October 19th, 2010

If you tell someone they can’t do something, they want to do it. Ban a book and it gets more attention than if it just sat on the shelf. The same applies to the Athletic Propulsion Labs Concept 1 shoes. David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, stated that the shoes give players an unfair advantage and banned the shoes.

The shoes cost $300, which is a lot for civilian use, but not that high of a price to make a dent in a professional basketball player’s salary. Why not let the whole league use them? I’m curious to see what the NCAA says about the situation.

The ban is already being used by the company as a marketing tool:
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Let’s hear it for Unintended Testimonial propaganda.

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Posted in Sports, Technology