A Walled Garden for Every School
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| A Walled Garden for Every School | |
| Number | 3248 |
| Broadcast Date | MARCH 27, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 30:21 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane |
| Guests | Allison Sheridan |
Apple has announced a new iPad with “pencil” support, but compared with recent offerings from Google is it too little too late? Plus, the governor of Arizona puts a halt on autonomous car tests in the state and Foxxconn is buying Belkin for $866 million dollars.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Apple announced a new 9.7-inch iPad that supports Apple Pencil available to students for $299 or $329 to the general public. The Apple Pencil which costs $99 will be $89 for students. Logitech also announced a stylus called Crayon for $49. And Apple announced the ClassKit development framework along with a free homework management app called Schoolwork and an update to make the Classroom app work on the Mac. We'll discuss this and Apple's attempt to get back into the education market later in the show.
- It's back! The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled Google did NOT have the right to use the Oracle-owned Java programming code in its Android operating system on mobile devices. The case now heads to a federal court in California to determine how much Google should pay. For those keeping score at home, Google has won twice at trial and Oracle has won twice on appeal. And one would expect Google to appeal this one which could see it end up in the US Supreme Court.
- Xiaomi announced the Mi Mix 2S which is similar to the Mi Mix 2 but with a Snapdragon 845 chipset and a dual camera on the back and comes in ceramic white, as well as ceramic black with 18K gold highlights. It comes out first in China ranging from 3,299 RMB ($527) to 3,999 RMB ($640). Xiaomi also announced the Mi Gaming Laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU for RMB 8,999 (around $1,440).
- Huawei announced the P20 Pro, P20 and P20 Lite phones, featuring a 3-camera system which adds an 8-megapixel, optically stabilized telephoto camera, allows for 3x optical zoom or a 5x hybrid zoom, and a color sensor at 40 megapixels. The P20 Pro also has dual-tone paint that shifts color based on how light hits the unit, thanks to something called non-conductive vacuum metalizing. The P20 is available now for €649 and the P20 Pro comes April 6 with a price of €899 respectively in Europe.
Top Stories
- Google is launching Cloud Text-to-Speech letting developers access voice synthesis powered by DeepMind's WaveNet software. WaveNet does not assemble syllables like most synthesizers but uses machine learning to generate the voice from scratch. WaveNet was integrated into Google Assistant in October. The cloud service will offer 32 different voices in 12 languages with users able to customize pitch and speed.
- Mozilla announced the Facebook Container Extension for Firefox that isolates Facebook cookies in a container. In other words, the extension makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity outside of Facebook.com. Mozilla says it does not collect data from your use of the Facebook Container extension, only the number of times the extension is installed or removed.
- Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a letter Monday that he has suspended Uber from testing autonomous vehicles in the state, following last week’s fatal crash. Uber had been testing self-driving cars in Arizona since late 2016. Nvidia has also suspended its testing of self-driving cars on public roads in New Jersey, Santa Clara, Japan and Germany, in order, "to learn from the Uber incident.” While at the same time, nuTonomy resumed its autonomous car testing in Boston after a brief pause. Meanwhile, Waymo will include up to 20,000 Jaguar I-PACE electric cars in an upcoming autonomous fleet as part of a long-term partnership. Waymo has plans to roll out a ride service to the public using Chrysler Pacifica Minivans in the Phoenix, Arizona area in coming months.
- Foxconn, which manufactures around 40% of all consumer electronics, is buying Belkin for $866 million in cash. Belkin, which owns the Linksys, Phyn, and Wemo brands, will continue to operate as a Foxconn subsidiary. Bloomberg reports Foxconn will also acquire Belkin’s portfolio of more than 700 patents in the deal, which still needs to be approved by the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
- You may have missed this, but earlier this month, Walmart filed a patent for autonomous robot bees called pollination drones, which can help to pollinate crops. The bee drones can pollinate like real bees, and also have tiny cameras and sensors to help detect locations of the crops that actually need pollinating. Walmart also filed five other patents for additional farming drones, including one drone that tracks plant pests and another that monitors the health of various crops, according to Science Alert. Harvard University researchers first tested their own RoboBees in 2013, and in 2017, a student at Georgia's Savannah College of Art and Design created Plan Bee -- a drone controlled by a smart device that artificially pollinates flowers on behalf of bees.
Discussion
- Apple’s new iPad with Pencil support is just $299 for schools
- Apple makes iOS more school-friendly with ClassKit educational framework
- Apple’s Schoolwork app lets teachers dole out digital assignments to students
- Apple is ready to fight Google’s Chromebooks with cheaper iPads
- Microsoft challenges Chromebooks with $189 Windows 10 laptops for schools
- Apple set to pay LA school district $4.2 million after failed iPad deal
- Global K-12 Mobile PC Market Projected to pick up in 2018, as Large National Projects Compensate the Slow Down in the USA
Mailbag
- Teachers on the secondary level are going to the flipped classroom model. Where the teacher videos the basic lecture and you watch that at home - then instead of a lecture the majority of time in the classroom is used for hands-on activities. Math and Science teachers love it because most learning comes from hands-on or lab, not lectures. But you can't penalize the students who don't have access. There are various workarounds for that like opening classrooms and labs before and after school. (some schools in Houston even provide dinner for students with practice or tutoring after school) If things are locked down to a specific brand of tech the problem will grow and be harder to manage.
- Sent by Kimberly the Texas Teacher
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| Preceded by: "Daily Token News Show" |
A Walled Garden for Every School |
Followed by: "Cloudy with a chance of SaaS" |