Geoboard for Visualizing Geometry

Looking back over this past semester of my first ever blog, I found myself musing about the intersection of technology with the physical world of learning. Here at school, in concert with our one to one iPad roll out, we've seen huge popularity among our younger students of the Japanese toy called a Kendama. A deceptively simple wooden toy involving a ball to toss and a handle to catch it on, this decidedly non-technological device has taken over our Lower School. Everywhere we turn, kids are practicing, playing, and challenging each other to new tricks. I've been delighted to see the appeal this simple toy has for our digital generation and how it is bringing kids together. (Yes, adults are playing with them, too, but not with the same dedication.)

It is funny how similar the Kendama situation feels to the atmosphere around the iPads. Our community members are also at varying levels of mastery of the iPads and are experimenting with new tricks of all kinds. So, for this week, here is an app straddling the junction of the physical and digital. This is a basic app that does one thing quite elegantly. It is a digital version of the old style peg board that one can stretch rubber bands on to create shapes. With two different resolutions, it lends itself to various levels of student.

At a basic level, it is good for exploring simple shapes and the concept of area since you can choose to fill in the shapes. 

On the higher resolution, one can start exploring similarity, symmetry, transformations, and the Pythagoren Theorem.

The app is nice and easy to use as well as being free. Enjoy!

As I prepare to sign off for the 2013 calendar year, I'd like to thank you all for reading and commenting! If there's an app you'd like to see reviewed or a task you'd like me to try to find an app for, let me know!

Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes for a Wonderful 2014!

Google+ Photo BackUp and Criminal Investigations

Using cloud services can sometimes result in odd things happening. This isn't an app review blog, as usual but a tale I have to share. I just noticed the free Google + automatic photo backup in the recent update on the iPad App Store, and I recalled something that happened to me last quarter. Talk about unintended consequences, but here's the story.

Once upon a time... 

No, really. The whole thing started with my installing the Google + app on my Android phone this past summer or spring or so. Apparently, I chose to activate or failed to uncheck an option to have all my phone photos automatically updated to my Google + account. In retrospect, I think I saw the option and since the photo back up didn't appear to count towards my storage limit, I figured why not. Anyway, we store the photos we care about on Flickr, so I never gave this another thought.

Then, at the end of the summer, I tried to log into my primary Google account (not my school account) and was told that my account had been disabled and that I could click on a link if I felt there was an error. I did that and filled in the form but got no response. Now, this caused a certain amount of panic and a lot of wasted time because this was my primary account to which I had everything else forwarded. I repeatedly tried contacting their customer service online and through the school, but couldn't get a response. So, I spent a few days retooling my life to do without my primary Google account. Thankfully, I'm pretty good about backing up, so I didn't really lose a lot of information. It was just a lot of work to get other things set up to take the place of Google, including our family calendar.

I guess one doesn't realize how deeply Google has penetrated into our lives until it is suddenly gone.

My account was reinstated about 10 days later with no explanation.

A bit later, I got an email from a very nice man from the Attorney General's office. It turned out that I was being investigated for trafficking in child pornography. He came promptly out to school to meet with me. After some quizzing and explanation, he showed me a picture that had been taken on my phone of my daughter in the bath. You know... parents and naked kid pictures. She's only 5. At any rate, since I had the automatic backup on my phone, the pictures were ALL being scanned by some kind of automatic algorithm on the Google end. This picture somehow looked suspicious and got automatically forwarded to local law enforcement. Thus, my account was automatically suspended. After talking for a bit, the investigator realized that I was confused and not criminal and closed the case.

Whew! Well. I have shut off the automatic photo back up, and we are working on handling our photo back ups in a way that doesn't involve cloud services, which apparently automatically scans everything. Thankfully, I have an IT savvy husband who can set up our own personal cloud server. Frankly, this whole thing gave me the shivers. I totally support stopping child pornography, but this episode really made me think twice about which cloud services I'm using for what -- Flickr, too.

Forewarned is forearmed, and there's more to our casual choices than we think.

The End.