Some of you may remember a post we ran last Wednesday, May 1, about a ridiculous website calling itself Blognix, and which had seemingly cloned TeleRead's entire site—content, design and all. Well, I suppose I was remiss in mentioning that just two days later, and without too much of a hassle, frankly, the head of NAPCO's IT department succeeded in squashing Blognix like the sad and pitiful little project it was. Incredibly though, Blognix morphed like an amoeba almost immediately after ridding itself of its bogus TeleRead cloak; it's now cloning a website called Cheap Tech For Me. Take a look for...

It's hard to believe it's already/only been three years since Apple introduced its category defining iPad. On the one hand, it seems like only yesterday. On the other hand, for those of us with tablet computers of one stripe or another, it's hard to imagine life before our new constant companions—in the same way those of us who came up before the Internet can barely remember the days before Pine. There was a great piece on Ars Technica about two weeks ago in which its editors reflected on the device, their initial impressions and its impact on their lives since. I recall my own...

Mike McEnaney spent nearly 10 years working as both an editor and a publisher of B2B photography and digital photography magazines for North American Publishing Company (NAPCO), the same organization that owns and operates both TeleRead and the Technology Tell network of websites. Very recently, though, McEnaney struck out on his own. And somehow, along with fellow journalist Greg Scoblete, he has already managed to launch Your Digital Life, a website about the digital photography revolution. McEnaney and Scoblete's latest project, however, is an e-book, also about the world of digi-photography. From Fleeting to Forever: Enjoying & Preserving Your Digital Photos and Videos, as...

Blogger Hollee Actman Becker is making headlines for her blog post on a disturbing Instagram trend: the 'beauty pageant', wherein tweenaged girls post collages of their friends and ask readers to vote on which is the prettiest. The girl with the least votes gets Xed out of the picture, and the game repeats until only one girl is left. Her reaction to the discovery that her own daughters were playing these games was swift and surprisingly heart-felt: she posted an image about beauty being only skin deep (which has since gone viral), and used her daughter's account to publicly ask girls...

I wrote last year about a theory I had, namely that digitization was enabling a more minimalist lifestyle for people who wouldn't otherwise be minimalist. I could still have my books, music and movies, but they wouldn't take up space anymore. Well, I'm doing my annual March break spring cleaning this week, and I've found that a recent addition to my tech arsenal has enabled me to take it one step further. The tool? An iPhone 5 with a scanner-quality built-in camera, and the free Evernote app Evernote is my brilliant new discovery, and to my delight, I just found a 'doc scanner'...

I wrote a few weeks ago about the health unit I'm doing with my Grade 2 class, exploring technology and how we can use it safely in our lives. Well, our second lesson was delayed by a snow day, so I've only now gotten around to lesson two, and it was a doozy! In our previous class, we did some brainstorming about what sorts of technology the kids use at home. For homework, I had them keep a log for two days—a school day and a weekend day. In this week's lesson, the first thing we did was tabulate the results. The students averaged...

So you’ve bought that shiny new tablet and fired it up. Now what? You’ve got a bunch of app icons, and you know it should be a great tool. But how do you learn to use it? This article assumes you’re new to the tablet world. If you’ve changed operating systems, like moving from an iPad to an Android tablet, you at least understand the basics of using a tablet. Your challenge is finding apps in the new platform to accomplish the things you’re used to on your old tablet. However, plenty of my clients have purchased their first tablet and hit...

As my school's technology coordinator, part of my job is to explore the different ways our students use technology, and how that's working for us. Are there tools we are under-utilizing? Tools we are over-utilizing? Are there concerns parents have over how their kids are interacting with technology on a daily basis? I learned recently, not to my surprise, that the answer to the latter question was a resounding yes. Children are exposed to so much technology these days, and it is so compelling for them. How can we make sure they're using it responsibly? Most of my students have parents who...

I posted an article earlier this week about the difficulty of finding ready-to-go technology stuff for kids, and I figured out why: The publishers aren't the only monolithic entity who is slow to innovate! It seems the Ministry of Education—in my Canadian province, anyway—is slow to innovate, too. Just for fun, I looked up Ontario's Science and Technology curriculum {PDF} (last updated back in the stone ages of 2007) and, to my surprise, found absolutely no reference in it to computer technology whatsoever. This wouldn't be such an issue if teachers were even remotely prepared to fill in the gaps themselves. But...

Fresh off the heels of CES and the Polaroid Kids Tablet and the iThis and the iThat, I have a confession to make about technology in education. And here it is: We actually don't need any more technology. We don't, really! That might be a strange thing to say in this age of tech abundance, but the truth is, what we need right now is better content, not better gizmos to run them on. Let's do a roundup of the gadgets currently on hand in my school: Computer Lab This gets used—a lot—by teachers doing their prep. The older grades do have allotted...

An interesting article in The Toronto Star looks at young urbans who are embracing more minimalist lifestyles by cutting clutter and consumption in favor of more experience-based lives. The article points to several factors underlying this trend including health, economic factors and 'the disposal nature of fast fashion and cheap electronics.' But it fails to fully explore what the digital revolution has really done for the aspiring minimalist, and that's 'enable them to have all the stuff they want without requiring physical real estate for it to inhabit.' My Beloved and I lead a pretty simple life. We work; we relax at...