Deep Fakes

A blog post for students network security class: Deepfakes represent a modern frontier of digital deception, consisting of counterfeit images, videos, or sounds generated through machine learning algorithms. While these tools can be used for entertainment, they are increasingly weaponized by hackers as social engineering techniques to psychologically influence human behavior. By using technology to Read More

Multimedia in Schools

159: Multimedia in Schools Generations of students have created presentations using a series of programs that combine text, images, audio, and video (thus the “multi” in multimedia). Many trace the beginnings of this type of educational software to HyperCard and HyperStudio, programs that available were for Apple computers marketed in schools in the early 1990’s. Interest in multimedia grew when video cards, color displays, audio Read More

A Story About Technology Leaders in School

161: A Story About School IT Leaders  I once coached a technology coordinator who was fond of saying, “I built what they asked for, it they asked for the wrong thing, that is not my problem.” He used it whenever the educators decided the system they wanted wasn’t exactly what they wanted and they asked him to Read More

BYOD and School Networks

165: BYOD and School Networks | RSS.com To minimize the expense of one-to-one initiatives, some schools choose to participate in bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives. This finds schools encouraging students to bring devices they own to school, connecting them to an SSID, and using them for their schoolwork. This can pose several difficulties for IT professionals; security being the most important. Others raise concern about equity as individuals may not be Read More

The Computer You Draw: Inside tldraw’s “Natural Language” OS

If you asked someone to design the future of computing, they’d probably picture a sleek brain-computer interface or a 3D spatial reality headset. They probably wouldn’t picture a whiteboard. But tldraw—the team behind the beloved open-source infinite canvas—has been quietly building one of the most radical reimaginings of how we interact with software. It’s called Read More

Comfort Zone Technology

163: Comfort Zone Technology | RSS.com One of the challenges of being a school technology leader (and probably in other fields as well, but my area of greatest expertise is in education) is what I (and probably others) call “Comfort Zone Technology.” Here is the general situation: A new leader is hired into whatever is Read More

Supporting Education in Rural Schools With Open Source Technology

157: Supporting Education in Rural Schools With Open Source Technology I’m messing around with rehashing my old writing with AI… here is an example from a chapter I wrote several years ago. In the chapter, I described several projects in which we supported education in rural areas using open source technology. Rural educators and school Read More

Open Source Technology

164: Open Source Technology | RSS.com I’m messing around with rehashing my old writing with AI… here is an example from a chapter I wrote several years ago Open-source technology is defined by its dimensions of transparency and freedom. This type of software is produced by a growing community and has begun to compete with Read More

Supporting New Teachers with Open Source Technology

I’m messing around with rehashing my old writing with AI… here is an example from a chapter I wrote several years ago Educational environments today demand that teachers constantly evolve their curriculum to reflect rapidly changing content expectations and new discoveries from the learning sciences. For educators who are developing previously untaught curricula or using Read More