Do you copy and paste text from one place to the other often? Are you annoyed when the formatting from the place you copied comes along when you paste? There are a few ways to do a ‘paste special’ depending on the destination application, but there’s something better.

Here’s a great tool for your Windows machine, called PureText. From Steve Miller’s website (not the band), the main features are:

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

Give it a try and see what you think.  It will certainly make your moving of text from one place to the other much easier.

From what I’m reading, the new iPad outputs 2048 x 1536 versus the iPad 2 which does 1024 x 768.  Assuming you get a new iPad and are an educator using the VGA pigtail to connect to your classroom projector, I’m wondering if the output down scales to 1024×768?  Most projectors I encounter handle the 1024×768 OK… but not 2048 x 1536.

I’ve not seen this addressed in the documentation yet, and wonder if educators using a new iPad and a VGA dongle will be disappointed to find out that their projector cant display such a high resolution.  One potential solution is to use the Apple TV + a LCD projector + a HDMI to VGA conversion box – but that’s pretty expensive compared to a $29.00 dongle.

I stumbled upon this great talk given by Bret Victor at the 2012 Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) called Inventing on Principle.  Bret talks about how computers should do the programming for us, and to quote him from the video below:

If we write code on a computer, why do we simulate what the computer should do in our head? Why the computer can not just do it and we show it?

I’ll let the video clip speak for itself.  I’m pretty speechless about how this system works and the implications for programming in the future:

If you would like to watch his entire talk at CUSEC, you can watch it on Vimeo.

In this talk by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, the idea of learning by ones self is explored.  From the Solving for X site, this background on the talk is provided:

Few people question that education is the most critical problem for to solve – both in the developed and in the developing worlds. The temptation is to see this as a social engineering questions and not as a technology challenge though. What if you just asserted it was possible for a device to be smart enough, cheap enough, rugged enough, and connected enough that it could be dropped into any village square and could not only teach children how to read, but teach them how to learn and inspire them that learning was fun. What would that take?

A week ago, I saw a great graphic on a design blog by Hyperakt.  They were hired by Design 360 to redesign the images that the word ‘teachers’ or ‘teaching’ bring to most peoples mind.

What they came up with is a whole set of brilliant graphics that, to me at least, describe school as a networked, collaborative and connected learning ecospshere.

They did a great job of thinking things through and dispelling with the ‘old-school’ ideas of an apple, ABC blocks and other items that bring back the idea of the one room schoolhouse.

If you don’t ask, you won’t get.  I noticed that their works did not specify any type of licensing, so I sent a tweet asking if they could consider putting a Creative Commons license on the art.  They did.

So, Hyperakt folks – thanks for doing this, and thank you for sharing your talent with the community.

I came across an interesting IOS application called Nearpod. This platform is a bit unique, in that I’ve not seen anything that aggregates presentation, feedback, collaboration and assessment tools into one application.

Here are a couple of video clips explaining what it is and does.

Nearpod Education: Pilot program Fall 2011 from Nearpod on Vimeo.

Nearpod NY Pilot from Nearpod on Vimeo.

Nearpod is a classroom collaboration tool. Learn more at www.nearpod.com

Samsung was showing off their Smart Window technology at CES in Las Vegas.  This looks very interesting for ambient information displays or perhaps in the classroom…. or maybe just checking Twitter on the bathroom mirror

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen anything in the news about CTL and the Classmate laptops.  Well, CTL is back via the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and has released two new models – the 2go Classmate PC NL3 convertible tablet and the 2go Classmate PC E12.  The former with the twist-flip screen and the latter which sports a more traditional laptop form-factor.

Each of the new entrants feature a 10.1-inch screen.  The NL3 has a resistive touchscreen that can be used with a stylus. Each of the laptops have very similar specifications to include a 1.6GHz Atom N2600 processor and 1GB of RAM. Interesting is that you can choose either a standard hard drive or Solid State Drive (SSD) for storage.  

CTL says both will be available in early February, with the NL3 starting at $499 and the E12 coming in at $349.