This year, the cloud brought us something we didn’t even know we were craving: a digital storage locker.

Think back to high school, when you stuffed that metal locker with books, homework projects, photos of friends, and maybe records or CDs.

But that music and everything else existed in only one physical place — you couldn’t really drag that locker around. If you forgot to get something and went home for the day — well, you were out of luck.

But now, the old “I left it in my locker” excuse just won’t work anymore.

“If I store my information online in one of these clouds,” says Forrester Research senior analyst Frank Gillett, “it’s as if I have a magic courier that will run and retrieve stuff from my locker and retrieve it for me, instantly.”

This makes me wonder if students who grow up with the cloud will forget more and more of their physical work at home or in their locker. Will they expect seamless access to their content from our classrooms? One things for sure, it’s still going to be a while before students will be able to upload their coat and boots to the cloud.

In a 2011 telephone survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30 percent of teenagers who were regularly online had shared a password with a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend.

Sure it’s a symbol of trust, but we don’t need much of an imagination to see how this can go horribly wrong.

The password sharing results were revealed as part of a larger survey title Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites.

This is what happens when we have a generation growing up without Seinfeld. George taught us to never share our passwords.

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Kramer also demonstrated that we should never make passwords about ourselves since they can be guessed easily.

Zappos, the Amazon-owned shoe and apparel retailer, said late Sunday that more than 24 million of its customer accounts had been compromised.

This week I received an email from Zappos, my favorite online shoe store:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

Scary stuff. Now hackers can use a network of computers to crack these passwords and try to login to my other accounts (like Gmail, Facebook, or worse) using the same password.

However, there are ways we can protect ourselves.

First, do not use the same password for every account you use. If one password is compromised, then every account using that password will be compromised. To prevent this, create unique passwords for your accounts. Don’t worry. You don’t have to remember hundreds of passwords. Just invent a pattern for creating passwords that is based on the account you are entering.

Here is an example.

Example Pattern: 56$$-FooD-$$65
(Food = the first four letters of a food that relates to the account I’m entering)

Example password: 56$$-OraN-$$65
(This might be my password for Yahoo. Since Yahoo ends in “o” I chose the first four letters of a food that starts with “o” to take the place of FooD)

Another example password: 56$$-EggP-$$65
(This might be my password for Google. Google ends in “e” and “e” is for eggplant.)

The trick is to make a pattern that is personal to only you.

The second thing you can do is use a strong password. I suggest using a password that is easy to remember but hard for a computer (even a supercomputer) to crack. Consider creating passwords using a password haystack. Please take a few minutes to watch this video to see how (and why) to use password haystacks. Then visit this site to create your first haystack.

People create programs to hack our accounts for a reason. There is money to made from stolen information. This has happen before and it will happen again. Be safe now. Fix your passwords today.

I'm a PC

Below are three free apps that try to bring a few more windows to the iPad.

• PocketCloud - Pocket Cloud lets you access your work or home Windows PC via Remote Desktop. There are several other apps in the Apps Store that offer this functionality but for a fee. When you need to get to your computer using only an iPad, PocketCloud does the job nicely in a touch environment
• CloudOn - CloudOn is an interesting new app that allows you access to the files in your DropBox account so you can edit them in a virtual version of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. The service was simple to set up but I did find editing documents to have a bit of lag.
• OnLive Desktop - The OnLive Desktop app takes virtual computing a step farther for iPad users by giving you an entire Windows desktop (Start menu and all) to play with. OnLive Desktop gave me the smoothest transition back to the Windows world. Creating an account (and waiting for it to activate) took longer than I expected but it came with 2GB of free storage for all my Windows files. Editing documents in MS Office was much smoother than CloudOn and I found this app to be a great way to show off PowerPoint presentations.

I should be clear about one thing. None of the apps above will replace your Windows PC. You won’t have an iPad that runs Windows too. The apps above are close but some things are are just not the same in a touch environment. If you’re an iPad user who also runs Windows, all three apps above are worth taking a look at but don’t throw out your PC just yet.

• Watch this video to learn how they work
• Use this site to create your own

We’re starting to see them pop up in classrooms too. We now have QR code scavenger hunts, periodic tables, and worksheets.

QR codes are great for passing long URLs to your students’ devices. I think they work best when you want to conceal information for a period of time while the students try to solve a problem you have given them. For example, let students scan the QR code for a hint on a difficult problem or create a guess and check bulletin board to review a recent lesson.

Scan and find your science teacher

However, are they always worth the time? QR codes are not as quick as they’re name (quick response) makes them sound. They are not worth the time for short messages that your students could probably type in faster than scanning. They are especially slow if your students do not already have the app required to read the codes installed on their device. You risk losing your lesson tinkering with technology for technology sake.

McKee Floyd, director of brand development for Sweetgreen, said it best when he spoke with NPR:

The issue I have with QR codes is that marketing is a little bit like telling a joke, and the longer the joke, the better the punch line has to be — and [using] QR code is a really long joke

I think the same is true in the classroom. If you’re going to use QR codes with students, make sure your punch line is worth it.

The post includes a video touting new 3D technology that will change your classroom forever. The video claims that 3D technology is the interactive tool that will improve behavior, increase attention, raise test scores, gets students working together, and create their love for learning.

What did I see? Dark classrooms full of students watching a teacher lecture.

They could be sleeping behind those dark glasses.

The video references student engagement seven times but if recall and remembering are your evidence for engagement, why even bother integrating new technology? We can do that with any old chalkboard, worksheet, or textbook.

Young adults are the most avid texters by a wide margin. Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month—and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

Here’s how the rest of the nation breaks down.

Wow! According to this table, I’m over 65!

Read the whole report.

This reminds me of a Dilbert I saw recently.

I’m with Dilbert, but our students are not.

Here are two ways to use text messaging with students:

1. post announcements to Twitter and have students follow via text message
2. use Google Voice to have students text their questions to your email

I like this GE video; it shows that our profession isn’t alone.

http://youtu.be/1dojpMfzNUo

Sure enough, for centuries the patient was on the examination table with the doctor above and at the patient’s left (I’m told this is because most doctors were right handed). See, doctor visits look just like they did 75 years ago.

Silly, right? Maybe it’s time to put the old classroom canard to rest and focus on the specific changes we’re after.

Looking for a place to start? I highly recommend this book:

Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do

Much of today’s talk came from this book.  For example, here are a few quotes from the book that caught my eye:

Persistent student cheating may corrupt a child’s character and lead to a devaluing of trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and honesty as fundamentals in a just society.

[cheating in school] may form a habit that persists and transitions into an adult’s work and life habits

• For teachers, many ways and reasons to cheat on tests – USATODAY.com
• Video: How to cheat in a test using a coke bottle!
• Video: CBS Early Show: Hi-Tech Cheating Poll and related article
• Hi-Tech Cheating: Cell Phones and Cheating in Schools (A National Poll)

If students are led to focus on ‘how well’ they’re doing more than on ‘what’ they’re doing, they may do whatever they think is necessary to make it look as though they’re succeeding.
-Who’s Cheating Whom? by Alfie Kohn (Phi Delta Kappan)

Schools fail to reward, and in some way discourage, good behavior on the part of the students. When so much emphasis is placed on grades and individual achievement, the system seems to breed dishonesty. Students learn to succeed by all means possible, even if this means compromising their integrity to obtain high grades.
-Denise Clark Pope (Doing School)

It’s not the dumb kids who cheat… it’s the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They’re the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught.
-Everybody Does It by an anonymous student (SFGate.com)

Some children and their parents have convinced themselves that they have to be superstars and go to Harvard, Stanford, or Brown to have a worthwhile life. This attitude leads to cheating by the most qualified, not the least qualified, students in some schools.
-Who Says Cheaters Never Win? by Kirk O. Hanson (Stanford Knowledgebase)

• Audio: Cheating In College Is Widespread — But Why? (NPR)

“The top’s cheating to thrive, the bottom’s cheating to survive…”
-Don McCabe

• Junie B., First Grader: Cheater Pants (Junie B. Jones, No. 21) by Barbara Park
• Cheating: Here, There, Everywhere (PBS Kids GO!)
• Dan Ariely
  • Books: Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality
  • Video: Why we think it’s OK to cheat

• Video: Teachers not in the room, let’s cheat!
• Don’t claim what isn’t your work
• South Korean human cloning pioneer ‘admits to fake evidence’
• Embryo cloning cheat resigns in disgrace

Science is not received wisdom, but informed guesswork. It may well be wrong. That’s life. Besides, what’s the alternative? To substitute our own gut feelings for scientific analysis, flawed though it may be? We should always be willing to question the outcomes of science, but we should be even more willing to question ourselves.
-In praise of scientific error by George Musser (Scientific American)

• Video: Candle Power
• Power Balance gets slapped in Australia
• Mythbusters Forums

…the more we focus on all the clever ways youngsters can cheat, the more likely we are to ignore the fact that the biggest single factor in escalating academic dishonesty is the failure of parents and teachers to diligently teach, enforce, advocate, and model personal integrity. It’s the adults, not the kids, who have the greatest responsibility to create an ethical culture that nurtures the virtues of honor, honesty, and fairness.
-Cheating Isn’t the Problem by Michael Josephson (Character Counts)