January 27, 2012
Calculate and Learn about Percentages with Percentage Calculator
Wesley Fryer,
Moving at the Speed of Creativity, January 27, 2012.
Honestly, you shouldn't need a calculator to be able to figure out percentages. It's easy. I'll show you how, where a small number (say 13365) is a percentage of a big number (say 456312):
- Divide your big number by 100. Eg. if it's 456312 you now have 4563.
- How many times does that go into your small number? Eg., how many times does 4563 go into 13365?
- If that's too difficult, divide each number by 10 and round off until it becomes simple. How many times does 456 go into 1336? Still too hard? How many times does 46 go into 137? Still too hard? How many times does 5 go into 14? Just under 2.5.
- Sure, it's a bit ballpark, because of the rounding (the actual percent in the example is 2.93 percent, which is actually near the outer edge of the margin of error for this method). But you can do it in about 5 seconds in your head.
- if you need more precision, proceed stepwise, calculating 1 significant digit each time you divide by 10, and keeping the remainer for the next step. Like so: 4563 goes into 13365 2 times; 456 goes into the remainder (4339) 9 times, etc., giving you 2.9
A WordPress Widget Perfect For Building Your PLN
Jeff Dunn,
Edudemic, January 27, 2012.
I'm not really a WordPress user but if I were I'd probably be looking at "a widget that displays a curated list of your favorite education blogs and websites." It's created by Dell Marketing. Hm. Maybe I wouldn't be so interested. "The widget has a special crawler that goes to a pre-set list of education blogs that are selected based on content quality. It then takes the title of the latest articles written by that blog and populates the widget sitting on the installer’s website." I had a look at the code; it's pretty elegant. I sometimes regret not joining the PHP-WordPress world because it would have been fund to code add-ons like this.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Marketing, Web Logs, Online Learning]
UStream Broadcasts from EduCon 2.4
Chad Sansing,
Cooperative Catalyst, January 27, 2012.
This looks like a fun time for people over the weekend: "This weekend several Coöp folks and National Writing Project (NWP) friends will meet-up and facilitate conversations at EduCon 2.4 which is a conference that aims to host conversations about technology in service of learning, learning spaces, and learners (I think)." Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, Kirsten Olson and Chad Sansing are hosting a conversation called Permission to Speak on Saturday while Mennoo Rami and Chad Sansing will host a hack jam on Sunday, January 29th. The UStream channel is here.
iPads For All: One Sales Team's Story
Chris Murphy,
Information Week, January 27, 2012.
I have a sense this is moving a lot more rapidly than people realize. For example, "Level 3 Communications just gave iPads to its 1,300 North American salespeople and sales engineers.... Level 3's sense of urgency is a reminder of just how fast tablets are moving into mobile workers' lives. 2011 was the year of pilot tests. 2012 is the year companies will roll out iPads by the thousands to entire sales and service teams, packing them with purpose-built business applications, not just generic email, browsers, and off-the-shelf productivity apps." It's what we always expected of mobile computing - I remember talking up a project to do this sort of thing for engineers in 1999 - but it took tablet-sized devices and ubiquitous internet to actually do it.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Project Based Learning, Ubiquitous Internet, United States, Assessment]
It Looks Like College Students are the Majority of Google+ Users
Kyle James,
.eduGuru, January 27, 2012.
Something called PlusDemographics is asserting that Google_ users are mostly young, mostly male and mostly students. Kyle James observes, "The one piece of data that this report doesn’t share is user engagement with the service. Facebook claims more than 800 million “active” users with more than 50% of these active users logging in on any given day. Google+ has 90 million user accounts, but how many of them are actually active?" To me, the most interesting part was the breakdown of how many Google+ users are active on other services. It's arguable that Google+ is reaching a new demographic not currently servered by other services, not even Facebook. I can see that; Google+ reaches out to me in a way these other sevrices do not.
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