Looking back, I know I've changed my thoughts about social networking. I now find myself checking my feeds more and more. I find that RSS will give you a lot of stuff to look at and think about and investigate and ... Twitter and Google+ on the other hand I now realize are very useful for getting up to the second information as well as using as a search tool. Not everything makes it to G+ & Tweets though. To my utter disappointment, I did not receive My Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade to my new Asus transformer Prime last Thursday as expected. I did a little searching, discovered, investigated and found out that my unit did not have the serial number hard coded into it - "serial number unknown". Without the serial number, the unit would not receive Over The Air updates.
Searched for more information. There were a few posts here and there about it. Almost nothing on Twitter or G+ about unknown serial number. The best source of information I found was on XDA Developer forum. Besides the unknown serial number problem I also found out about WiFi and GPS problems the TF201 was having. Blah Blah Blah to Asus was all over the place. Trash the Transformer Prime people were saying. I did some hard thinking and decided to return mine back to Best Buy before the return grace period ran out. I didn't want to get stuck with a $500 lemon.
After returning it, the guys on the floor were like, "What? You had one and you returned it!?" Yes I did. I might be regretting it a bit now. After a few days of silence from Asus and them not even acknowledging that the problem exists, there was a rep from Asus on the forum trying to help out (too late for me though). A temporary update fix is there and most likely a permanent fix will be forthcoming. Perhaps I jumped the gun. Anyways, I was surprised that I really didn't find much on Twitter or G+ about it since it was affecting quite a few people and this particular tablet has been hot news for a few months and was finally shipped recently. The issue is popping more frequently now on G+ and Twitter. G+ tends to have different sources of information posted whereas Twitter has lots and lots of re-tweets tweets from the same Engadget post. Interesting.
So, I have been using these tools now and feel more comfortable being able to teach how to use them. I think feeds about the elections will be good ones to use in school though it will be worthwhile to find some good hashtags and sources where people are actually informing or giving sane opinions rather than ranting. It just kills me how the Apple haters and the Windows haters and the Linux haters and the Andriod haters just can't stop bickering back and forth on just about any comment section or forum. Perhaps there's a lesson there we can teach about how not to post. How about you set up a imaginary topic and then have kids post, bickering (with appropriate language of course) back and forth. It would probably be fun for them. Then at the end you could look back and reflect on how nothing got done or solved. Nobody was really informed of anything useful and the time wasted writing and reading was just that, time wasted. Then turn it around and try having students give useful constructive posts. Just a thought.
Back to finishing up my work.
Links to sites I have been working on for my assignment if anyone cares to look.
1) Vanilla-CPS
2) Tech-Infusion:
3) Dr. Brenda Noach Elementary & Secondary School and DBN Connect:
On an unrelated note, I'm thinking about jumping on the tablet bandwagon this spring, and I may pick your brain about what's worth the money out there.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of finding a way to get kids to post intelligently online. The only problem I can see is that they probably find that bickering entertaining. If you pointed out that they didn't accomplish their task, most would be thinking "Yeah, but it was fun!" Maybe give each one a role- either someone focused on getting things done, or someone to antagonize. Give them a task and a time limit, then see how annoyed the "get things done" kids get. Then you can compare how those kids tried to get the project back on track. Unfortunately, I think idiots on the internet will always be a constant.
Also, Macs suck!