How to Defend Your Android Phone From Annoying Mobile Ads

Your Android phone used to be an ad-free paradise--a place where you could play games, check email, and make a few calls, all without being bothered by those pesky sales pitches that have taken over your PC. But not anymore: As Android's popularity has grown, so too has its attractiveness to advertisers. More->>

Quality Online Discussions

Online discussions often lack substantive content that demonstrates the use of higher order thinking skills by students. Many statements that students contribute to discussion forums include vague generalizations and restatements of basic information. Little intellectual depth is provided in these statements. The lack of thoughtfulness of students during these discussions minimizes the instructional value of discussions. Therefore, many students feel that online discussions benefit them minimally.

Perhaps, students need help with the concept of substantive content. It may be possible to provide students examples of quality discussion scaffolds to enable the students to see attributes of quality student discourse. One proposal is that course instructors create fictitious students who generate quality discussion posts in the online environment. This approach establishes a culture of high expectations, forcing students to evaluate their discussion contributions.

If you can see the video below, you've got an HTML 5 supported browser that also supports a streaming video format called H.264 (or MP4). If not, the space below will appear blank, contain a non-working artifact, or will give you information. In any event, the script for the video is immediately below the video clip.

SCRIPT:

Hello, I'm Glen Gummess, instructional designer in the Center for Instructional Delivery.

I'm here today to tell you about how video is becoming easier to view, and to create, for the world wide web.

The key word is "becoming" for while great progress has been made in enabling people to shoot and upload videos to the web, there is still a lot of work to do to make it truly as easy as taking a picture on a webcam and uploading it to Facebook.

The current state of the art for viewing video on the web is Flash video. Whenever you go to Youtube, or view a news clip on Yahoo, you're viewing a Flash video, based on Adobe Flash.

However, mobile devices do not support Flash video. So, a way had to be developed to deploy videos for I-phones and android devices.

One new emerging standard is HTML 5. Unlike flash video, HTML 5 video plays without an add-in. Browsers that support HTML 5 just play the clip faster and without taking as much computer resources.

Web page authors that write HTML 5 can now just insert a video with a simple HTML "tag". There's no need to embed complicated code in the web page.

Example:

HTML 5 is now supported by a variety of browsers, as this table shows.

You can even test your browser to see if it supports HTML, by going to this web site:

HTML5test-dot-com..

But, not all browsers that support HTML 5 support the same types of video, due to various competing video formats.

And as long as that competition continues, the full implementation of HTML 5 will be delayed. That competition is likely to continue for a few years to come.

10 Great Tools to Get in Shape

The New Year is finally here--and with it comes the realization that you probably had one too many pieces of pie at that last holiday party. Whether you want to work off just a few holiday pounds or you've made a New Year’s resolution to get in shape, you can find tons of fitness tools online and on your mobile phone that will provide motivation and assistance.

Here are ten great tools that will help you track what you eat, where you run, and how quickly you’ve lost weight. More ->>