Purpose Games is a free service for creating and or playing simple educational games. The service currently gives users the ability to create seven types of games. Those game types are image quizzes, text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank games, multiple choice games, shape games, and slide games.
According to the Digiconomist blog that follows cryptocurrencies, all the Bitcoin mining computers worldwide consume more power collectively than the entire nation of Czech Republic.
When the value of a traded Bitcoin soared to almost $20,000 late last year, a Bitcoin mining rush hit lots of places with cheap power, from Louisiana to Washington State.
https://www-wired-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wired.com/story/187-things-the-blockchain-is-supposed-to-fix/amp
Blockchains, which use advanced cryptography to store information across networks of computers, could eliminate the need for trusted third parties, like banks, in transactions, legal agreements, and other contracts. The most ardent blockchain-heads believe it has the power to reshape the global financial system, and possibly even the internet as we know it.
Now, as the technology expands from a fringe hacker toy to legitimate business applications, opportunists have flooded the field. Some of the seekers are mercenaries pitching shady or fraudulent tokens, others are businesses looking to cash in on a hot trend, and still others are true believers in the revolutionary and disruptive powers of distributed networks.
Mentions of blockchains and digital currencies on corporate earnings calls doubled in 2017 over the year prior, according to Fortune. Last week at Consensus, the country’s largest blockchain conference, 100 sponsors, including top corporate consulting firms and law firms, hawked their wares.
Here is a noncomprehensive list of the ways blockchain promoters say they will change the world. They run the spectrum from industry-specific (a blockchain project designed to increase blockchain adoption) to global ambitions (fixing the global supply chain’s apparent $9 trillion cash flow issue).
Things Blockchain Technology Will Fix
Bots with nefarious intent
Skynet
People not taking their medicine
Device storage that could be used for bitcoin mining
The European Union‘s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, goes into effect on May 25
The objective of the regulation, which passed in 2016, is to simplify and consolidate rules that companies need to follow in order to protect their data and to return control to EU citizens and residents over their personal information.
Individuals in the EU will have the right to access or request that companies erase or migrate their data elsewhere. When asked, companies must prove to authorities that they have satisfactory policies and procedures in place to protect their data, or they will face huge fines. How huge? If your company’s not compliant, the fines could be as large as 20 million Euros (about $24 million) or four percent of your annual global revenue, whichever is higher.
“A U.S. tourist who visits Germany for one day and returns to the U.S. has rights under the law if that person used [a service like] Facebook while on the trip,” Alex Stern, an attorney wrote on his firm’s blog.
Your reflexes are shot and your hand-eye coordination is dodgy – so how do you keep up with the kids in the world’s biggest video game? Here are the 13 rules of survival
Fortnite is a “battle royale” game in which 100 players land on an island, run around collecting weapons, resources and items from abandoned houses, build forts for protection, and then attempt to blast each other right back into the starting menu. The last player standing wins.
If you’re thinking of dipping your toe in, here are 13 tips to get you started.
1. Stay on the battle bus until the end
2. Land on a roof when you eject from the battle bus
3. Prioritise weapons over resources in the opening seconds
4. Learn about weapon grading
5. Learn to make a basic fort
6. An assault rifle and a shotgun are your must-have weapons
7. If you want to practise shooting, go to Tilted Towers
Like any augmented reality app, the new AR content in Google Expeditions lets students view and manipulate digital content in a physical world context. The new AR content can be used as components in science, math, geography, history, and art lessons. Some examples of the more than 100 AR tours that you’ll now find in the app include landforms, the skeletal system, dinosaurs, ancient Egypt, the brain, and the Space Race.
To use the AR content available through Google Expeditions you will need to print marker or trigger sheets that students scan with their phones or tablets. Once scanned the AR imagery appears on the screen. (You can actually preview some of the imagery without scanning a marker, but the imagery will not be interactive or 3D). Students don’t need to look through a Cardboard viewer in order to see the AR imagery.
In his book, “Experience on Demand,” Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, writes, “No medium, of course can fully capture the subjective experience of another person, but by richly evoking a real-seeming, first-person experience, virtual reality does seem to promise to offer new, empathy-enhancing qualities.” Bailenson contrasts experiencing virtual reality with reading news accounts and watching documentaries. Those latter activities, he writes, require “a lot of imaginative work,” whereas virtual reality can “convey the feeling” of, say, a refugee camp’s environment, and the “smallness of the living quarters, the size of the camp.”
Caldwell—who used Google Expeditions to deliver a virtual reality experience set in the Holocaust—says that when his students first put on the goggles, they viewed them as a novelty. But within a minute or two, the students became quiet, absorbed in what they were seeing; they realized the “reality of the horror of what was in front of them.” Questions ensued.
Ron Berger, the Chief Academic Officer of EL Education, points to another factor schools should consider. He thinks virtual reality can be a powerful way to introduce kids to situations that require empathy or adopting different perspectives. However, he thinks no one tool or experience will bring results unless it is “nested in a broader framework of a vision and goals and relationships.”
Berger says virtual reality experiences have to be accompanied by work beforehand and follow-up afterwards. Kids, he says, need to be reflective and think critically.
immersion experiences like virtual reality should be “embedded in positive” adult and peer relationships. He adds that ideally, there’s also a resulting action where kids do something productive with the information they’ve learned, to help their own growth and to help others. He mentions an example where students interviewed local immigrants and refugees, then wrote the stories they heard. They published the stories in a book, and the profits went to legal fees for local refugees.
saving virtual reality for “very special experiences,” keeping it “relatively short” and not getting students dizzy or disoriented. A report Bailenson co-authored for Common Sense Media highlights the research that has—and has not—explored the effects of virtual reality on children. It states that the “potentially negative outcomes of VR include impacts on children’s sensory systems and vision, aggression, and unhealthy amounts of escapism and distraction from the physical world.”
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The Brain Science Is In: Students’ Emotional Needs Matter
What the neuro-, cognitive, and behavioral research says about social-emotional learning
Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development.
• Malleability: Genes are not destiny. Our developing brains are largely shaped by our environments and relationships—a process that continues into adulthood.
• Context: Family, relationships, and lived experiences shape the physiological structure of our brains over time. Healthy amounts of challenge and adversity promote growth, but toxic stress takes a toll on the connections between the hemispheres of our brain.
• Continuum: While we’ve become familiar with the exponential development of the brain for young children, it continues throughout life. The explosion of brain growth into adolescence and early adulthood, in particular, requires putting serious work into much more intentional approaches to supporting that development than is common today.
Session Title: Measuring Learning Outcomes of New Library Initiatives Coordinator: Professor Plamen Miltenoff, Ph.D., MLIS, St. Cloud State University, USA Contact: pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu Scope & rationale: The advent of new technologies, such as virtual/augmented/mixed reality, and new pedagogical concepts, such as gaming and gamification, steers academic libraries in uncharted territories. There is not yet sufficiently compiled research and, respectively, proof to justify financial and workforce investment in such endeavors. On the other hand, dwindling resources for education presses administration to demand justification for new endeavors. As it has been established already, technology does not teach; teachers do; a growing body of literature questions the impact of educational technology on educational outcomes. This session seeks to bring together presentations and discussion, both qualitative and quantitative research, related to new pedagogical and technological endeavors in academic libraries as part of education on campus. By experimenting with new technologies such as Video 360 degrees and new pedagogical approaches such as gaming and gamification, does the library improve learning? By experimenting with new technologies and pedagogical approaches, does the library help campus faculty to adopt these methods and improve their teaching? How can results be measured, demonstrated?