January 31, 2017

Possibly Future Hologram Smartphone Concept

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Your future smartphone could be entirely voice activated, displaying your text messages and other info with holograms. At least, that's the idea behind Alo, a new smartphone concept that imagines a touchscreen-less smartphone.

 Alo- Created by French designer Jerome Olivet, ditches the typical smartphone display and instead the voice activated phone will project holograms from its camera to show you messages, or let you watch videos.

 The core of the device is molded aluminum alloy, the outer shell is a "gelatinous, supple and natural envelope that perfectly fits in your hand.". Alo will come with an AI assistant that will respond to users voice commands and learn each users speach patterns.

 Need a smartphone to hold you off until the holographic market takes off? Rent a smartphone today!

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January 23, 2017

Top 10 Free Software Alternatives

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No one likes spending all that money on those high end software's like Microsoft Office, Photoshop and Sony Vegas Pro, unless you have a company buying the licenses for you. Here are some of the best more affordable apps that will help you get the work done.


  1. GIMP (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  2. Libre Office (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  3. Inkscape (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  4. Blender (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  5. Avira (Free, for Windows) and Sophos (Free, for macOS)
  6. LMMS/Linux MultiMedia Studio (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  7. VirtualBox (Free, for Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  8. DaVinci Resolve (Free, for Windows, and macOS)
  9. Linux (FREE OS)
  10. Google Drive (Free, web based)

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January 20, 2017

New Windows 10 "Game Mode"

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PC gamers are by far the most die hard of gamers, yet most deny Windows 10 for a supposed drop in performance compared to Windows 7. However now Microsoft is promising to optimize gameplay with a new "Game Mode" in its new update. Its extremely vauge on details but on a post by the Xbox team, Game Mode will optimize your Windows 10 PC for increased performance in gaming, and thats basically it.

Want to test out Game Mode when it comes out but dont have a PC? Rent one today.

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January 12, 2017

New Opera Made Web Browser Called Neon

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Does your Rented Computer need a  makeover? Well Opera released a new web browser today called Neon that’s meant to try out a bunch of untested design ideas. Neon isn’t close to being ready to replace your main web browser it’s being called a “concept browser” — but it does have some neat ideas that are fun to try out and, in some cases, you can imagine becoming part of a major browser one day.

Neon's homepage looks far different than any other browser's. Although it still has shortcuts to bookmarks and top websites, they are displayed as floating bubbles that are on top of your desktop wallpaper. There is no obvious search engine bar either; there is just a line above all of the floating balls asking you to type something in.


At the point the browser is at now it is too slow and odd to actually become a main browser for most people, but Opera isn't exactly shooting for that. Its real goal is to experiment with new ideas and test new never before seen features. One of the smarter ideas in Neon is built-in support for split-screen browsing. Drag one website’s bubble (its tab) over top of an already open page, and Opera will offer to split your view in two. Their sizes are adjustable, though only one side of the split-screen will respond to other tabs you want to open up — the other side remains more or less fixed.

Visually it is very pleasing. The browser also does away with traditional tabs, replacing them with circular icons on the right hand side of the browser, one for every page you have open. On the left hand side of the browser are a series of browser tools; one for screenshots, another for a gallery containing those screenshots, one for downloads, and finally the most interesting button pulls out an overlay that Opera calls the player. The player collects the songs and videos available to play throughout all of your tabs.

It is now available on macOS and Windows

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January 04, 2017

10 Things That Must Change About Educators, Education

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There are hundreds of things written daily regarding changes, reforms and new research in the profession of education. But much of this comes from outside entities (researchers, politicians, parents, leaders and others) aimed at educators. It’s time for educators to own the changes, thus owning the profession. We need to truly flip the whole concept of what it means to teach and be a true teacher.This can apply to all educators who understand that we have to redefine the profession.
     Here are my 10 things that must change about the profession and the practitioners:


  1. Professionalism - Teachers need to claim and lead the professional standards of their own profession. Just like in the profession of law enforcement, the system cannot tolerate or endure bad professionals. Cops need to police their own and so do teachers. For too long, we have collectively accepted that there are going to be a certain percentage of just plain “bad” teachers. The fact is that they not only harm the profession, they ultimately cheat students. And we should not tolerate that. Unions, tenure, contracts or whatever be damned. And with the teacher shortage at crisis levels, we cannot afford to continue this trend. The millennials will not flock to a profession that tolerates such an ethical divide where some teachers are not there with a moral purpose to help students and treat them well.
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  1. Community - Globalism has affected education in many ways. But to be honest, teaching has always been a community-oriented profession. The only way to have impact on students and learning is to be integrated into the community. This is why many teachers choose to coach teams, advise clubs, and lead extra-curricular and co-curricular activities. As teachers, we often complain about not having enough respect professionally from our society. And that is sadly true. But the only way to combat is to be leaders in our communities. This does not mean we cannot have private lives or that we have to live our profession 24/7. But it does mean that we cannot hide. Like we addressed above, we cannot have teachers that show up before school starts and leave when school is out and never engage with their communities. There are dozens of ways to do this and we have to do it in some way.
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  1. Innovative / Creative Mindset - Dave Burgess of the Teach Like A Pirate kingdom (http://daveburgess.com/) has often said it best. He says teachers will say it’s easy for him because he’s creative. The truth is, according to Dave, is that one has to work at being creative. It is like everything else - it has to be a focus and on-going effort. We all have different innate talents and abilities, but we can apply them creatively to our profession if it’s a priority. This does not mean we all have to be artists, but it does mean we have to continually re-imagining our instruction, curriculum and profession.
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  1. Relationship Masters - Personal friend and Edu Guru Jon Corippo (https://sites.google.com/site/mistercorippo/) said that he always viewed his role as a teacher was to be a “Maker of Kings.” In other words, it was his duty to treat every student with personal attention and take them to their personal optimization. This is only possible if we view ourselves as professionals focused on relationships. Too many teachers either see this as a pesky side note or sadly even irrelevant. Teaching is not primarily about content and curriculum, but it’s about connections. Students want to work for people, not systems. They want to perform for people that care about them and make daily effort to connect with them personally. We should know this because as educators we operate the same way. How to maximize relationships with students needs to be foundational in our teacher education programs and lifelong professional learning.
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  1. Advocacy - We can’t leave this to others. We all have to be advocates for all things education - funding, technology, autonomy, professional development, policy and more. But maybe most importantly, we all need to be the ultimate advocates for young people. Too many adults, including many educators, spend way too much time unnecessarily criticizing  and belittling young people. More than anything, students need someone who is consistently going to bat for them. Who better than teachers to serve in that role?
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  1. PD Patrons / Promoters / Purveyors - As part of our role as consummate professionals, we need to embrace Professional Development as a universal foundation of education. We cannot preach lifelong learning to students and not live it ourselves. PD cannot be viewed as something that administrators make us attend. It has to be something we take ownership in by leading PD, presenting at conferences, reading professional literature on our own, selecting PD options, partnering with colleagues, requesting more time to develop professionally on our own and so on. Too many educators view Professional Development like too many of our students view school - it’s something that happens to us and not with us. This has to change.
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  1. Curriculum Curators - The days of being textbook dependent are gone. We cannot be professionals if our curriculum is created by publishers, test makers or corporate entities. We have to own our curriculum which means we all have to individually and collectively be “curriculum folks.” With the world becoming more project-based, along with unlimited resources online, there really is not an excuse not to design curriculum for one’s current students based on their needs, interests, relevance and input. The digital world is our new textbook and it’s unlimited.
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  1. Consistent Collaborators - This is not an isolated thing. Indeed, it’s the top skill that employers are looking for in our current students. We have become a truly collaborative universe and we have to work this way - especially in education. The work is too demanding, evolving, specialized, customized and dynamic to work as solo artists. To be brilliant, we need one another. Collaboration can be with our with colleagues at our sites and all over the world thanks to social media. But we also need to view collaboration as beyond our colleagues. We need to collaborate with students, parents, community members, business leaders, politicians, volunteers, experts, professionals and all stakeholders.
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  1. Change Agents - All educators need to begin to view themselves as not captives of change, but masters of it. Change is inherent in learning and we need to model it. We should continually push for experimentation, risk taking, new approaches, new ideas, new skills, new levels of mastery, new models and new design. If we cannot embrace change, we need to get out. If we can, then we need to lead it. With the number of problems, issues and challenges that our students and world face, we have to know that change will be the only constant.


  1. Futurists - Teachers have traditionally had many responsibilities including, but not limited to lesson design, classroom management, assessment, parent communication and many others. However, most teachers have not seen themselves as students of the future. We cannot afford to leave this to the academics and the business leaders. Educators need to understand the quickly changing dynamics of our new globalized economy and digital planet. It’s not enough to know that things are changing, we need to understand why. We need to regularly study the trends, the data and the innovators. Much of the resistance in the teaching ranks towards technology, new standards and things like project-based learning are directly related to a disconnect to what is really transpiring in this new age.


Hope you enjoyed these 10 things that must change about educators and education. As usual, I’m confident the list is not comprehensive or complete. Like everything else, it will have to change.

(photos courtesy of Foter, Pixabay, Pics4Learning)
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