Thursday, 28 July 2016
The Best Education Blogs
- Cool Cat Teacher: Vicki Davis is one of the most recognised names in education blogging as she has been in demand from the likes of Forbes, The Washington post, Mashable plus she runs her own radio show on BAM! Radio. Even though she’s busy with all of this plus teaching fulltime, she still finds time to answer comments on her blogs – we salute you Vicki!
- Emerging Ed Tech: Kelly Walsh uses his blog to amplify the idea that teachers should embrace technology in their classrooms. Take a look at his site to discover how “not to teach like a dinosaur” by introducing digital resources into your teaching. Also, we were excited to publish an article featuring ExamTime on his popular blog recently.
- EDUKWEST: This may be a surprising entry as it differs from others mentioned because it isn’t a teacher writing about their experience or discoveries. However, we have come across some great insights and articles on the site such as the recent Remind IPO news. They also have a sister site which features education start-ups (such as ExamTime).
- Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Med Kharbach’s site is a goldmine of useful elearning content with new resources, useful rubrics and informative videos. The blog is a hive of activity with several new posts published daily. We’re big fans and regularly share posts from the blog with teachers across our social media
- Free Technology for Teachers: As one of the longest running education technology blogs, Richard Byrne has accumulated a hugely impressive library of articles. Visit the site to see the latest resources shared by the award-winning blogger. We’re also very proud that he has featured ExamTime numerous times with his audience of engaged teachers.
- Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day: Larry Ferlazzo is not only decorated with awards but writes for the New York Times, Edutopia and also hosts his own radio show on BAM! Radio. Keep up with his blog to get resources on a range of topics from fun infographics, learning English to education policy.
- Teach Thought: Education dreamer Terry Heick supports teachers worldwide by publishing articles with educational ideas to introduce 21st century tools to students. The site hosts some powerful content and uses visuals in a great way to convey information.
- Rafranz Davis: Last year Rafranz was featured on our site as an up and coming education blog but the self-titled “Digital Diva” has moved up in the ranks for 2015. The first thing you will spot on her blog is the technology and visuals she integrates into her blog to engage the reader in her stories. She shares some personal insight into her education career and keeps you up-to-date w
- eLearning Industry: Christopher Pappas and the team at eLearning Industry create a vast amount of shareable content while also providing a resource where you can share your articles with their sister site eLearning Tags. Whether you’re a teacher implementing elearning practices or an instructional designer, the tips on the site will help you.
- The Innovative Educator: Lisa Nielson is on a mission to transform education into an exciting and fun process for all students. Along with blogging about teaching ideas, Lisa also shares tips on how to improve your own teacher blog. She also provided some insight on engaging students in a meaningful activity to learn rather than note-taking for our guide.
- ELearning Brothers Blog: Here at ExamTime, we’ve recently started following the ‘Bros.’ blog after we noticed their articles getting a lot of shares across social media. Aside from sharing free elearning resources from Adobe and other providers, the team also give some actionable tips plus discusses key elearning trends.
- Kathy Schrock: Kathy’s ‘Guide to Everything’ provides a goldmine of advice and recommended tools. Whether you’re interested in using iPads in the classroom or how to create a mini infographic, this site should be made into a handy pocketbook for e-teachers.
Tuesday, 26 July 2016
Skills shortage and poor IT infrastructure hinder tech adoption by Asean government
Sub-standard hardware, staff shortages and poor data-sharing are impeding the adoption of cutting-edge technology by the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The Microsoft-sponsored report, High aspirations, stark realities: Digitising government in South-East Asia, is based on a survey of 300 IT leaders and interviews with experts in industry, government, academia and the civic sector.
Respondents said their priority is better use of data, including cloud access. More than one-third (37%) named cloud computing as the most important tech trend, and there were also high hopes for the internet of things (IoT).
As regards barriers to greater utilisation of technology, top of the list is lack of skills, according to 46% of survey respondents in government, whereas 44% of those working in the technology sector said the main barrier is organisational ICT infrastructure.
In view of high-profile cyber attacks around the world, a surprising finding was that only (16%) of south-east Asian governments consider cyber security a barrier to public-sector technology adoption. The research showed that private clouds that isolate sensitive information from public clouds have reduced security concerns.
“Organisational challenges have overtaken security concerns [as barriers] for governments in south-east Asia as they seek to deliver more and more services digitally,” said Charles Ross, editor of the report.
“Governments in the region have an opportunity to stand at the forefront of smart-government development, but only if it addresses real challenges related to employee and citizen ICT skills, and insufficient infrastructure.”
Asean governments’ sub-optimal investment in infrastructure and training of staff, and their inability to attract better staff when competing on salaries could be because many governments are underfunded compared with the local private sector, said Jim Longwood, research VP at Gartner.
A Gartner survey found that 10% of CIOs in south-east Asia believe the scarcity of talent is reaching crisis proportions, and 48% feel they are suffering from talent shortages.
Longwood noted that in the more emerging south-east Asian countries, global and Indian service providers are setting up offshore delivery centres, increasing competition for experienced resources in countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines.
By contrast, Singapore’s success as a regional hub for global company headquarters has increased competition for better IT resources, resulting in increasing take-up of nearshore outsourcing to Malaysia and offshore to India.
The EIU study also reveals gaps in perception. Just 20% of Singaporean respondents believe the government is “very effective” at implementing new technologies. This contrasts with 57% of Indonesian respondents and 33% overall.
Singaporeans who are long used to easily accessible internet connectivity and robust services are likely to have far higher expectations of their government than users in less developed markets where connectivity is less accessible.
The respondents’ priorities – better data use, IoT and cloud computing – echo the focus of CIOs in the Asean region. Gartner’s 2016 CIO study found that Asean CIOs are focused on investing in business intelligence/analytics, cloud, mobility, infrastructure and datacentres as well as digitisation, with legacy migration a low priority.
“Factors such as improving operational efficiencies via better infrastructure operations and use of digital channels, along with reducing costs, were common drivers for these priorities in south-east Asia as well as globally,” said Longwood.
From SQL to NoSQL – and back again
The first thing to say about NoSQL databases is that the name is misleading.
Another term used to describe this family of technologies is “not only SQL”, which may be cumbersome, but at least acknowledges that SQL (structured query language) – the main interface to traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) – is still sometimes used to query NoSQL databases.
That said, NoSQL has become the common parlance for databases used to process the huge datasets that many web-scale applications rely on.
NoSQL databases have a more flexible model than RDBMSs, making it easier to organise large amounts of data with varied formats that change over time.
For example, take a car manufacturer’s database, linked via an internet of things (IoT) application to every individual car that has been sold.
Each model has a different initial data structure, which may change over time as more sensors are provisioned and the data collected from them increases.
Customised records of the millions of individual cars can be maintained as they develop unique change and service histories.
NoSQL databases aim to provide unlimited scalability, delivering consistent high performance, however big the data set becomes and however many nodes the database is spread across.
To this end all the popular NoSQL products support Hadoop, the open source software ecosystem for big data that provides massively parallel processing across clusters of thousands of servers; just add more hardware or cloud resource to keep up with demand. Some large and complex transactions may take hours to process on a centralised RDBMS, but only a few minutes on a NoSQL database distributed across a Hadoop cluster.
Millions of simultaneous users can be supported over different time periods; for example a simple finance transaction may take just milliseconds to complete, but the need to monitor a user’s online activity may persist for minutes or hours.
RDBMSs still dominate the overall database market on many measures and are still the obvious choice for some transactional applications, especially in finance, where great store is placed on the consistency of transactions. NoSQL trades stringent consistency for speed and agility. If a user interrupts their viewing of a video stream they are impressed when the service picks up where they left off – if it does not it is inconvenient, but does not create a legal problem.
That said, one NoSQL supplier, DataStax, says it is seeing a move to more relaxed consistency accepted by banks in favour of the immediate customer experience, for example, authorising a cash withdrawal at a remote cashpoint before funds are confirmed to be available; better to please most customers and pursue the few that go over agreed limits at a later date.
The term NoSQL is not new. It was first used in the late 1990s, and some of the data models that underpin it go back even further. However, it has come to prominence with the rise of big data and the need for web-scale processing. Another supplier, Couchbase, describes three market phases; first, in the mid-2000s the market was developer-driven for small-scale, niche projects. Then, in the 2010s, NoSQL started to be used for mission-critical applications, where guarantees around scale and performance were required. The third phase for Couchbase is the beginning of enterprise-wide deployments; NoSQL is now being used to manage some of the largest global data stores for applications ranging from social data mining, through sensor data analytics to stock market analysis.
Open source
The developer-driven nature of the early NoSQL market lent itself to the open source licence model and most products are licensed as such. Measured by downloads, MongoDB dominates the market, claiming 300-400 thousand deployments (most using the free version). MongoDB is an example of company-driven open source, where a supplier owns the source code and puts it in the public domain, only charging customers that want a certain service level agreement or to use add-ons. Couchbase operates in the same way. A comparison from the RDBMS world would be Oracle’s MySQL.
The alternative is “true” open source projects, such as those run by the Apache Software Foundation that commercial suppliers can modify and provide commercial distributions of, in the way Red Hat does with the Linux operating system.
The most widely used commercial distribution of the Cassandra open source project is from DataStax. Other Apache-run NoSQL projects include CouchDB (not to be confused with Couchbase) and HBase. There are also pure commercial NoSQL offerings such as MarkLogic.
Flavours of NoSQL
There a four basic types of NoSQL database and a dizzying number of suppliers with overlapping support for the various systems. A given organisation may use multiple products to support different use cases and a single supplier may support different models, for example, DataStax says it already supports the first three listed below and will soon support the fourth.
The most basic model is the key value store, which is supported by most NoSQL databases. Data is stored as objects, the structure and composition of which may vary for each entity. Embedded in the objects are keys which can be used to quickly retrieve the required data from look-up tables. Typical use cases are online advertising and gaming, where cookies stored on a server can be quickly retrieved and used to feed custom content to millions of individual users. Aerospike is a specialist in this area, others include Basho’s Riak, the Symas LMDB (lightning memory-mapped database), Redis and MemcacheDB.
Apache’s Cassandra and HBase are both examples of column databases which build on key value stores by creating collections of one or more key value pairs that match a record. This model is particularly good for handling time series data such as IoT tables, messaging and recommendation engines.
Cassandra was initially developed by Facebook to power inbox search and was open-sourced in 2008. DataStax, the flagship commercial distribution of Cassandra, was released in 2010 and now has around 500 paying customers deploying cloud applications which are intensely transactional and can “never go down”, supporting needs such as user activity tracking and fraud detection.
MongoDB and Couchbase are both document databases; others include MarkLogic and CouchDB. Cassandra now supports the document model as well. Json (JavaScript Object Notation) is used to describe documents and define dynamic schemas. MongoDB cites one customer, Sky’s Now TV, that is able to handle spikes in demand for online TV streaming during the screening of popular events, including English Premier League games or new episodes of Game of Thrones. This ensures that, wherever possible, a unique and consistent customer experience is maintained. Now TV hope this will enable it to take on Netflix, which is itself a DataStax customer.
Couchbase says it focuses mainly on enterprise deployments and has 500 paying customers. Many are in digital economy segments such as e-commerce, online video, financial services and the IoT, where, for example, it works with GE on its Predix industrial internet platform. Couchbase is widely used to record user profiles and sessions, storing millions of unique states and for maintaining regionally dynamic inventories for retailers such as Tesco and Staples.
Finally, many consider graph databases – such as OrientDB and Neo4J – as NoSQL databases. Here another layer is added to the relationship between objects and documents via links that map them together for rapid association. For example, mapping connections on social media or to find patterns in crime data for predictive policing or to optimise call routing across telco networks.
Querying NoSQL databases
As mentioned at the start, NoSQL is a poor name, as SQL can be used to query NoSQL databases. Couchbase has a fully SQL-compliant interface. However, many have their own interfaces for example the MongoDB and Cassandra query languages. Drivers and SDKs are provided for the most popular programming languages allowing database calls to be embedded in applications. There are also a variety of ad hoc query and analysis tools, such as Drill, Spark SQL, Hive and Pig, all open source and available from Apache
The fight back! NewSQL
The old school has not taken the NoSQL challenge lying down; Oracle, for example, has its own NoSQL implementation. However, RDBMS suppliers and the now almost-establishment NoSQL school are having to face up to a new set of upstarts dubbed NewSQL, a class of RDBMS that seeks to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL while still maintaining the transactional consistency. NewSQL suppliers include MemSQL, NuoDB and MariaDB, and Google Spanner.
What goes around comes around!
Skills shortage and poor IT infrastructure hinder tech adoption by Asean government
Sub-standard hardware, staff shortages and poor data-sharing are impeding the adoption of cutting-edge technology by the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Latest articles on HR best practices: mobile apps disrupting the annual staff appraisals; reasons for and against open-source software; and Rolls-Royce case study.
The Microsoft-sponsored report, High aspirations, stark realities: Digitising government in South-East Asia, is based on a survey of 300 IT leaders and interviews with experts in industry, government, academia and the civic sector.
Respondents said their priority is better use of data, including cloud access. More than one-third (37%) named cloud computing as the most important tech trend, and there were also high hopes for the internet of things (IoT).
As regards barriers to greater utilisation of technology, top of the list is lack of skills, according to 46% of survey respondents in government, whereas 44% of those working in the technology sector said the main barrier is organisational ICT infrastructure.
In view of high-profile cyber attacks around the world, a surprising finding was that only (16%) of south-east Asian governments consider cyber security a barrier to public-sector technology adoption. The research showed that private clouds that isolate sensitive information from public clouds have reduced security concerns.
“Organisational challenges have overtaken security concerns [as barriers] for governments in south-east Asia as they seek to deliver more and more services digitally,” said Charles Ross, editor of the report.
“Governments in the region have an opportunity to stand at the forefront of smart-government development, but only if it addresses real challenges related to employee and citizen ICT skills, and insufficient infrastructure.”
Asean governments’ sub-optimal investment in infrastructure and training of staff, and their inability to attract better staff when competing on salaries could be because many governments are underfunded compared with the local private sector, said Jim Longwood, research VP at Gartner.
Read more about government IT in Asean
- From May 2017, most of Singapore’s public servants will not be able to access the internet from their workstations.
- Security is a rising concern in the Asean region, with fears fuelled by incidents such as the recent hacking incident in Manila.
- A young, urban and tech-savvy population in the Asean region has forced enterprises to rethink their IT strategies.
A Gartner survey found that 10% of CIOs in south-east Asia believe the scarcity of talent is reaching crisis proportions, and 48% feel they are suffering from talent shortages.
Longwood noted that in the more emerging south-east Asian countries, global and Indian service providers are setting up offshore delivery centres, increasing competition for experienced resources in countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines.
By contrast, Singapore’s success as a regional hub for global company headquarters has increased competition for better IT resources, resulting in increasing take-up of nearshore outsourcing to Malaysia and offshore to India.
The EIU study also reveals gaps in perception. Just 20% of Singaporean respondents believe the government is “very effective” at implementing new technologies. This contrasts with 57% of Indonesian respondents and 33% overall.
Singaporeans who are long used to easily accessible internet connectivity and robust services are likely to have far higher expectations of their government than users in less developed markets where connectivity is less accessible.
The respondents’ priorities – better data use, IoT and cloud computing – echo the focus of CIOs in the Asean region. Gartner’s 2016 CIO study found that Asean CIOs are focused on investing in business intelligence/analytics, cloud, mobility, infrastructure and datacentres as well as digitisation, with legacy migration a low priority.
“Factors such as improving operational efficiencies via better infrastructure operations and use of digital channels, along with reducing costs, were common drivers for these priorities in south-east Asia as well as globally,” said Longwood.
Monday, 25 July 2016
The Pokémon Go Trainer's Advanced Tactics Handboo
You’ve tossed a few PokéBalls, caught a few Caterpies, and spun your way to a few items at the PokéStop, but it’s time to take things to the next level. These tips and tricks will help you go from novice trainer to unbeatable gym leader faster than you can spit out the PokéRap.
Swipe the PokéBall Button for Quick Menu Access
The PokéBall icon at the bottom of your screen is used to access most of the in-game menus, like your Pokédex, Items, captured pokémon, and the Shop. You can tap the PokéBall icon and navigate to these menus, or you can look like a pro and get to them with a single swipe. Swipe the PokéBall left to instantly access the Pokémon menu, swipe right to go right into your items, and swipe up to access the shop.
See at a Glance Why a Wild Pokémon Appeared
When a wild pokémon pops up out of the bushes, look at the tiny rings surrounding it. If the rings are white, the pokémon was there naturally. If the rings are a purple-y pink color, it showed up because of a nearby lure module. If the rings are replaced by a pink cloud circling the pokémon, that means it was attracted to your Incense item and only you can see it.
Noticing the different rings will help you develop a feel for finding more pokémon in your area, and it’s nice for when you’re playing with friends. You’ll know not to shout “Squirtle!” when you see the incense ring and start an unnecessary stampede.
Increase Your Chances of Catching Pokémon, and Earn More XP
It might seem easy at first, but catching pokémon gets harder as you level up. You start running into stronger pokémon, and your once-massive stash of PokéBalls will start to dwindle if you don’t learn the ins and outs of the perfect throw. When you see a pokémon appear, tap it on your screen, then move to a spot where you’re safe and out of the way. Once you’ve started an encounter, the pokémon will stay on your screen until you either catch it or runs away because of too many failed attempts.
When the encounter starts, you’ll notice a white circle around it. That’s the target you have to hit for your PokéBall to work at all. Inside the white circle, however, is a constantly-shrinking, colored circle (more on that later) that tells you how difficult it will be to catch the pokémon. Your goal is to toss your PokéBall and hit the inside of the shrinking, colored circle. Doing so will grant you more experience points (XP) depending on the size of said circle:
- A “Nice!” toss happens when you get it inside the colored circle while it’s fairly large, and will grant you an additional 10 XP if you make the catch.
- A “Great!” toss happens when the colored circle is about half the size of the white circle, and will grant you an additional 50 XP.
- An “Excellent!” toss happens when the colored circle is very small, and will grant you an additional 100 XP.
Not only do good throws give you some extra XP, some resourceful redditors who have datamined the Pokémon Go app suggest good throws may alsoincrease the chances of catching the pokémon. They also suggest throwing a curveball increases your chances as well, in addition to the 10 XP bonus it provides. To throw a curveball, you just hold your finger on the PokéBall, spin it around, then toss. If you’re having a hard time hitting the pokémon, turn off the AR so it stays still in one place. This also helps you save a ton of battery.
Those XP bonuses may not seem like much on their own, but they make a huge difference over time, especially if you have an item like the Lucky Egg activated, which doubles XP gained for 30 minutes. A good toss and Lucky Egg can turn an encounter with a common pokémon like Pidgey—which would normally only net you 100 XP—into a much more profitable catch. Not only would you get 200 XP for the catch, but an “Excellent!” toss and curveball bonus would add another 220 XP, making that little Pidgey worth 420 XP. It’s almost as much as the bonus for catching it for the first time.
As mentioned earlier, though, some pokémon are much harder to catch, and it all depends on the color of their shrinking circle. Red means very hard, orange means hard, yellow means moderate, and green means easy. For red, orange, and yellow pokémon, a few items will help ensure you make your catch. Razzberrys will lower the difficulty of catching a pokémon by one color, but they are only good for one attempt. If the pokémon breaks free, you’ll need to use another. Using GreatBalls or UltraBalls will increase your chances as well, but you have a much more limited supply, so save them for the really tough pokémon.
Optimize Your Pokémon Training and Evolving
The value of an individual pokémon depends on a few things: your trainer level, its combat power (CP) when you found it, and its move set. Generally, you only want to keep the pokémon with the highest CP and transfer the rest to Professor Willow in exchange for candies you can use to evolve your bestpokémon (here’s a breakdown of how many candies each type of pokémon needs to evolve). Once they’re evolved, you can worry about powering them up with stardust. Here’s an example:
You find two Charmanders, one with a CP of 230, and another with a CP of 450. You keep the Charmander with 450 CP (maybe tag it with a favorite star so you know it’s your best), then transfer the other Charmander to the Professor to get a Charmander candy. You don’t power up the Charmander you kept, but wait until you have enough candies to evolve it into a Charmeleon. Again, you don’t power it up, but wait until you have enough candies to evolve it into its final form, Charizard. Only then do you begin to use the stardust you saved to power up your Charizard.
If you want to find pokémon with higher CPs, you need to increase your trainer level. Niantic, Pokémon Go’s developers, have been very quiet about how CP works, so here are a few more things you might want to know about it:
- All pokémon of a certain type have the same maximum CP, regardless of what their CP was when you caught them. Basically, a 100 CP Charmander and 450 CP Charmander have the same maximum potential, and that is determined by your trainer level. It’s still best to keep the higher CP one, though, because you’ll save yourself resources powering it up in the long run.
- Some species of pokémon have a higher maximum CP than others.
- If your trainer level increases, the maximum CP of all your pokémon increases. That means the pokémon that belong to a trainer at level 20 all have a higher CP cap than those that belong to a trainer at level 10.
- Evolving a pokémon will raise their current and maximum CP, but the percentage trained will remain the same. For example, a 20 CP Pidgey with a max of 100 might evolve into a 40 CP Pidgeotto with a max of 200—it stays at 20%.
A good rule of thumb to follow is don’t evolve a pokémon that didn’t have a red ring when you caught it. But say you have two Charmanders that both have high CPs. Which do you evolve? If you’re planning on battling with one of them, look at their move sets. It’s best to have a pokémon with two different types of attacks. In Charmander’s case, a version with Scratch (Normal type)and Flamethrower (Fire type) is more ideal than a Charmander that has two Fire type moves. That said, if you want to train some seriously strong pokémon, the best thing you can do is raise your trainer level as fast as possible. It’s better if you don’t waste your resources on powering up the pokémon you find early on in the game. This is especially important with stardust, as it becomes a much rarer resource the longer you play. Be stingy with your resources and focus on building your trainer level first.
Boost Your Trainer Level Quickly With the Lucky Egg Trick
You can level up a lot faster by saving a ton of weak pokémon to evolve when you have a Lucky Egg activated and doubling your XP gain. So, catch a bunch of Pidgeys, Rattatas, etc., and build up a stash of candies. Now activate a Lucky Egg, then start evolving them all. You’ll get 1000 XP for every evolution instead of the standard 500 XP.
Pro tip: don’t evolve Pidgeottos into Pidgeots while you do this! Evolving four Pidgeys into Pidgeottos will cost you 48 candies and net you 4000 XP with a Lucky Egg activated, but just one Pidgeot will cost you 50 candies and only get you 1000 XP with a Lucky Egg. Do the math before you undo all your hard work. Also, Nick Steinberg at Goliath points out that you can battle with pokémon and wear them out before you evolve them. Go fight at an enemy gym with some pokémon and they’ll be returned to full health once they’re evolved.
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