Google Photos

 

Google Photos

Why?

1. Unlimited storage (for GApps domains)
2. Support across all devices, mobile, laptop, desktop...
3. Mobile device/iPad friendly albums
4. Searchable photos, even without your naming them, Google can recognise the content in your photos, eg if you search for 'dog'. 
5. Media backup, using the desktop uploader you can now upload all (or as much as you want) of your media to Google Photos, and remove it from your hard drive to save space.

Google Photo Albums

You can easily find Google Photos, by using that link, or you can also find it by clicking on the app grid in GMail, then scroll down:

 

See this post for guidance on using Google Photo Albums, sharing them, adding collaborators to collate photos, creating animations, and collages, and even adding text ...

Math Bytes

Units of Measure in the 21st Century

It's always been a source of great consternation to me, that mathematics benchmarks around the world still appear to be completely oblivious of the implications of the impact of digital technologies in the world of mathematics.

To see explicit evidence of this, you need look no further than the Mathematics benchmarks that are currently used for the teaching of measure, which are still confined purely to units which, while still useful, are no longer the most common units of measure that are are significant in the lives of people who rely upon digital technologies in their daily lives. That means most of us, especially if you're reading this.

Why is it that in schools that are blessed with the ubiquitous provision of digital technologies, one-to-one laptops and iPads, the students never learn anything about how file sizes and the measurements of file sizes work?

There are two main reasons for this as far as I understand it:

• Almost universal ignorance on the part of teachers, more of whom are still largley completely oblivious of the difference between a megabyte and gigabyte. 
• An assumption that a generation of digital natives just automatically get this stuff, trust me, they don't. 
• A somewhat naive assumption that if there is a subject area that will remain unaffected by the influence of digital technologies it has to be mathematics. 

Teach Maths for your present, and their future not your past... 

Ask yourself, how can it make any sense in this day and age for students to be able to complete their mathematics education, competent in the calculations relating to kilograms and kilometres and millimetres and litres, but not have the slightest clue about the units of measure that are fundamental to the devices that they rely on every day?

The problem is caused by this... lack of awareness are profound. I don't know of any students who find themselves in difficulty is because they were confused about the difference between a metre and a kilometre, but I regularly encounter students and teachers who are flummoxed by their their inability to understand how big a megabyte is and why they can't email that 200MB video that was ‘rejected by the server'.

Fortunately, the solution is obvious; educate the teachers and they will educate the students, but unfortunately it looks like these things will not change until the ‘official, mandatory' benchmarks change. If anything this post is a desperate plea for just a bit of common sense; do you really need a mandatory benchmark for you to realise that in this day and age it is absolutely essential that our teachers, and their students, are as familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, as they are with metres and kilometres?

One extremely rare example of digital measures in Maths - Khan Academy

Trust me, it's not that difficult, if anything it’s actually easier to understand than traditional units of measure. When teaching measurements of length students have two differentiate between tens and hundreds and thousands, but when dealing with units of measure for file size, it's much simpler, everything is 1000 times bigger than anything before. That's it.

Put your practice where your pedagogy is...

So, inspired by Khan Academy, I put my my practice where my pedagogy is, I ran a lesson with a grade 5 class, with the single goal of demonstrating how easy it is to enable students to get to grips with this fundamental unit of measure. Essential to this was simplicity, and I know of no technoogy that is simpler to use, and as transformative in application as an effectively used 'wiki' space. In this case, as a GApps school, we used a Google Site, but any kind of online fora will suffice, more on the power of online 'interthinking' via wiki spaces here.

As with all of these kinds of lessons, most of the work goes into formulating a decent provocation, one that is not too narrow, otherwise all you get is 22 responses that are pretty much identical, as every student just imitates or duplicates the previous response. The prompt below shows how this can be avoided. In terms of 'doability' this task took me about 15 minutes to set up, and while I was able to complete the activity within one lesson, and one homework, to be honest it could have run for a week if I'd let it.


Prompt:

It was immediately apparent how natural this online environment is, and as can be seen in the clip below, far from being a screen dominated task, it stimulated a great deal of (on task) discussion and collaboration.  Remember these kids wrestle (without any help from teachers or textbooks) with file size every day, so asking them to envisage scenarios that use these quandaries as problem solving situation is not a big deal.

Just one example of interthinking in this lesson...

Interthinking - online and offline

It's important to note that, while the activity is screen centred, the learning is not confined to the screen, the students were just an animated (I reckon more so) than they would have been if this has been presented to them as a worksheet (which it could). But the transformative difference here is that moving it to a web based interactivity (not just an activity—see what I did there ;)?) facilitates the leverage of the transformative elements of SAMMS:

Access: They can easily search for clarification on specific elements they find confusing, such as units they want to consider that are not in the prompt (petabytes anyone?) particular vocabulary, or clarification about the amount of storage associated with particular contexts they wish to consider, eg the capacity of their smartphone, their games console, memory card, tablet etc.

Mutability: In response to feedback (from peers and their teacher), students can easily duplicate and revise their posts and post a second post (by effectively 'replying' to themselves) that shows clear evidence that relevant criticisms have been resolved.

Multimodality: Of course this entire medium is multimodal, if we had had another lesson, this activity could have been expanded to allow students to incorporate image, audio and video.

Socially Networked & Situated: As it is online, we can facilitate a P2P homelearn (as opposed to homework) activity. Assign assessment buddies to feedback on each others posts at home, of course the teacher can now easily monitor the quality of these online interactions, and interject, support, clarify, redirect as necessary.

I've included some examples below that illustrate how powerful this task was, and how easy it is to set up. 

Note that a great deal of the conversation (on screen and next to it) centred on wider mathematical concepts that would be relevant to the teaching of traditional units of measure, eg appropriate use of units, conversion of units, and that old favourite, explain your thinking... Now that's what I call a #winwin

Below you can find a PDF of the original discussion in it's entirety, bear in mind that this is not the actual discussion, which continues to develop following this capture.

Hard Drive Full? Stressed about Storage?

Now we have switched to MacBook Airs with 'only' 250 Gigabytes of hard drive space (as opposed to the 500 Gigabytes in a MacBook Pro), some teachers are finding that they are running out of storage space, this post is to help you deal with it.

Before you do anything, do the easiest things first:

• delete the contents of the download folder
• empty the trash (including the trash in apps like iPhoto)
• in iMovie, delete the projects, and the related events from projects you have finished with, and don't let them build up...

First and foremost you need to understand that 250 Gigabytes is a LOT of space, the problem is that many, if not most teachers still fundamentally do not really understand how big a gig is.

How big is a Gig?

A kilobyte is about one page of text, a megabyte is a 1000 times bigger, about one digital photograph, and a gigabyte is a 1000 times bigger than that, like one high definition full length movie.

So a Gigabyte (Gb) is a 1000 times bigger than a Megabyte (Mb), and a 1000 times smaller than a Terabyte (Tb). What? I have explained this in more detail in another post, but maybe one of these analogies will help, trying to represent everyday sizes that are 1000 times bigger as you move up the scale:

How many rice sack sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

How many elephantine sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

How many suitcase sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

So with 250 sacks of rice/elephants/suitcases worth of storage (250 Gigabytes) on your MacBook Air to use, how can you be low on space? A few reasons:

• You transferred everything from your previous computer, chances are you need about 20% of that.
• You have loads of video hiding in your iPhoto library.
• You have load of video clogging up your iTunes Library.
• You have a load of video files languishing in folders on your Mac, maybe on your desktop, or somewhere else... 

By now you may have noticed a pattern forming, the main culprit is video. If you have a recent model of smartphone it is likely (whether you realise this or not) that you are recording in 'high def', tech speak for very high quality, and there is no easy way to change this. All you need to know is that just 1 minute of video can easily be 200 Megabytes, that's 200 bags of rice, or 200 cats, or 200 carry on cases of storage space. That's insane, and yes, this will eat up your hard drive capacity faster than a Panamanian termite mandible strike.

Solutions?

Get rid of most/all of your video, if you don't want to delete it, then move it to an external hard drive* how? Well it's most likely buried in the following locations:

There's probably loads of video in your iPhoto library, but how do you collate it all in one place? To view all of the video in iPhoto, create a 'smart album', instructions here, where you create an album which only shows 'photos' that are movies—yes, you're right, that does not make much sense, but it works. This will allow you to view all the video you have in iPhoto in one album, then you can either select the lot and drag it to a folder on an external hard drive, or delete it (hold down option + command, then hit the delete key).

If you're keen on buying/renting video via iTunes, or even importing video into iTunes so you can play it on an Apple TV*, get in the habit of removing it when you've watched it. My advice is not to use video in iTunes at all. Anther storage hog in iTunes are all apps stored in the iTunes folder if you sync an iOS device with your laptop, you can remove these as they're all stored in the App Store for you anyway.

Use your Time Machine back up drive (You do have one, right?) for extra storage, this can be used as a normal harddrive, just don't put anything in the database folder called 'backups.backupdb', the rest can be used as you like. In Time Machine preferences you should exclude non-essential folders from the backup process, such as Google Drive, Dropbox and the Downloads folder.

Search & Destroy

In the Finder (if you're confused by this just click on your desktop—assuming you can still see it), press Command and F to bring up a custom search, which you can tweak to focus only on file size, this is a great way to find massive files lurking in obscure parts of your hard drive:

Choose 'This Mac', change 'Kind' to 'Other', then pick File Size from the menu. Now tweak the parameters, I'd start with greater than 50 MB, right click the menu bar and choose Size from the list, click on this to sort all your files with the biggest at the top. Now start deleting. Command+delete keys are a easy way to quickly delete things, you'll still need to empty the bin when you're finished.

Use 'cloud' (online) storage instead... 

Now we have more cloud storage than you can throw a thumbstick at, you can store more online—but remember that one day you will leave UWC, and when that happens you're back to 'normal' cloud storage space—'unlimited storage is only for educational (gapps) domains, not private Google accounts.

If you are going to store loads of content in the cloud, eg Dropbox, Google Drive et al, you can easily find yourself with more content in the cloud than you have space for on your computer (Google Drive is 1 Terabyte now, that's a LOT of elephants) which means you won't be able to simply sync it all with your hard drive, instead you can use selective sync, to only sync the folders you choose, here's how it looks in Google Drive, similar options are available in Dropbox as well:

Files you don't have permission to edit will not be 'syncable'.

Choose what you use, and change these to reflect your changing priorities.

*Finally, if you're someone who absolutely NEEDS to have massive amounts of storage handy, all the time, everywhere, then maybe it's time for you to move into true nerd territory, and go for a Laptop Hard Drive Backback solution, yes, there is one, in fact there is more than one.

*Importing video into iTunes just so you can watch it on your Apple TV? No need, just download Beamer, and bypass iTunes completely,  just drag and drop from anywhere, including an external hard drive; even better it plays any video file, not just the video files iTunes likes.

Picasa & iPhoto The Dynamic Duo

First, activate your Picasa account if you have not done so already, click here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

Yes you can ignore iPhoto and upload directly to Picasa/Google Photos (web address https://picasaweb.google.com/home) but this does not RESIZE the images, so you will eat up your storage limit very quickly... Fine for students, not so much for teachers.

Short and simple - the best way to do this is using iPhoto with the Picasa Web Album uploader, here, which bypasses iPhoto, and lets you drag and drop images for upload, all resizing options are available as above.

1. Import the images to iPhoto (drag and drop on the icon on the dock) 
2. Remove the photos that you don't want 
3. Select the photos you want to share (select individual images, a whole album, or event) 
4. Drag and drop to the uploader 
5. Choose 'Unlisted Album' (this is automatically 'anyone with the link' in Picasa = perfect for our purposes) 
6. Choose 'Faster Upload' 
7. Click Export 
8. When it's done, you'll get a 'View' option, click that 
9. Share the album via the Share button. 
10. Click the box "Let people I share with contribute photos" if you want that option, they will need a Google account to be able to contribute, comment or like images in your album. 

PS

Easily confused: Picasa Web Albums vs Picasa the application:


Images can can only be downloaded one by one from a Picasa album, unless you download and install Picasa the application (free) which basically does the same job as iPhoto (image management and editing) but will also allow you some other options, like downloading entire albums, and syncing your albums with Picasa (as opposed to just uploading to Picasa).


Your parents cannot download video, or an entire album from a Picasa web album, only view, unless they 'upgrade' to Google+ then they can. If you wish to share video that you want the recipients to be able to download, (without using Google+) then share it via Google Drive.

Printing and Constipation

If you are having problems printing out files, the chances are the culprits are all those MASSIVE images you are squeezing into those documents.

Just dragging the corners and squeezing an image into a smaller hole does nothing to change the actual image size, it just squeezes it into a smaller hole.

Then when you send it to the printer it overloads its precious memory and you get printer constipation.


The solution is simple, before you print, reduce the file size, this is easier than you might think.


In Word, just choose 'Reduce File Size...' 

Or in Pages:

You will find similar options in applications like PowerPoint and Keynote as well.

Back it up.

I often get asked what the best solution is for backing up your data - a question that is best asked BEFORE you lose all of your precious digital memories, but sadly is often asked afterwards.

These days it's not uncommon for a typical family with a couple of kids in Junior School or higher to easily have in excess of 20-30 hours of video footage (still waiting to be edited) and several 1000 images. By the time your kids are ready to graduate it's a safe bet that you can double that - and at that size, chances are it won't all fit on your computer/s hard drive/s - which means you need a way to back up those files AND get them off your computer hard drive.

But first things first.

For storage of images and video you need to use a local computer hard drive, most likely the hard drive of your Mac. And to back this up you should use an external hard drive with Dropbox or Google Drive for everyday files, and Time Machine for everything else.

The problem comes when your local Mac Hard Drive is FULL, and you need to move that media off your Mac, just dumping onto an external drive is not good enough, as if that drive fails, (quite likely in my experience) you lose everything.

You can buy ANY Hard drive, they can all be reformatted on a Mac, using the Disk Utility Application, which will erase the drive and make it Mac (Mac OS Journaled), if you want to use it with Time Machine, or FAT 32 if you don't want to use it with Time Machine, and want to be able to read and write to the drive from a Mac or PC.

If you plug a brand new drive into a Mac, you should get a prompt from Time Machine asking you to format the drive automatically, all you have to say is YES!

If you do use a separate hard drive, make sure that you always have the data in TWO locations, otherwise it's not backed up, just moved. So if your Mac is FULL and you need to make space, this is not a good solution.

The solution for moving data off your HDD completely is to use a 'Hard Drive Enclosure' With a couple of Hard Drives plugged in. This is a 'RAID' set up: a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (redundant meaning, you can afford to have one fail without it being a problem) a big black box ($200) with space for 4 drives to slot in, each drive can hold about 1 TB or more depending on what you buy...

Back in 2013 I bought the Probox 4 Bay for $195, at Sim Lim Square (Best Bargain and I bought two 1.5TB internal drives to slot into it ($100 each), so I still have two spare lots for later expansion...

I make one drive copy the other, so I don't have to keep it on my Mac - remember if the data is not in two places it's not backed up!


Mine looks like this:

And like this when it's open, you can see where the internal drives can be slotted in, just like Lego.

They come in all sorts of shaped and sizes, but they all work the same way, data on one of the drives is copied onto another drive in the same enclosure, so now it IS backed up, and you can free up that space on your Mac.

The process of copying that data from one drive to another can be done automatically (RAID), some of the more expensive solutions come with built in software that does this automatically, or you can just do it yourself, by copying data from one to the other manually, a bit tedious, but it gets the job done, this is known as JBOD.

Drobo is one well known brand, well known by geeks anyway, there are others.

If you're happy to spend a little more money (this media is priceless after all) Consider a hybrid solution like Amazon S3, mostly because the NAS has integration built in and can use an existing normal amazon store account to manage the storage as well. I'm sure there are others, ideally you want a local, cable connected (reliable) RAID backup, combined with a cloud back up, this might be integrated into the RAID box, or you might set this up separately, see below:


A cheap/easy option is to use Google Photos, unlimited backup is free, but resizes the media, or pay a reasonable amount to store all your media online, without resizing...

If you install the desktop and iOS apps, it will automatically upload ALL your media to your Google account.

https://photos.google.com/

https://photos.google.com/apps

Size?

If you're confused about sizes of hard-drives, see my other post here. But a guide would be that each internal drive needs to be at least 1 Terabyte, so if you buy 2 you effectively have one, as the second drive is just mirroring the first one.

Finally maybe there is stuff you can just remove?

For starters simply emptying the trash can make a big difference!

For example delete unused user accounts, sometimes there are several.

size matters...

Do you know your bytes and pixels from your mega/kilo/giga/tera bytes? If not, read on...

Quite a few teachers have approached me, who are worried about using up their hard drive space, but fret not dear educators, your MacBook has a HUGE hard drive - but how huge? Generally when I excitedly point out that you have maybe 200 to 500 Gigabytes of space (depending on the age of your Mac), I invariably get a look that looks like I have just emitted a noxious fume from my nether-parts. So here goes...

The smallest unit of memory is a bit, then a byte, and they go up in thousands from there, so a thousand bytes in a kilobyte, a thousand kilobytes in a megabytes... and so on.

Here's a simpler way to imagine it...

1 bit (short for binary digit) = teeny tiny, the smallest size you can get, and yes, useless to you.

1 byte (b) = 1 character in the alphabet, eg the letter 'a'. = still useless

1 kilobyte (Kb) = 1000 bytes = 1000 characters, eg, a page of text = now we're getting somewhere...

1 megabyte (Mb) = 1000 Kilobytes = 1000 pages of text = 1 large digital image = 1 minute of music (mp3)


5 megabytes = 5,000 kilobytes = 5,000 pages of text = 1 very large digital image = a 5 minute song (mp3) This is pretty much the upper limit for email attachments.

10 Megabytes = 10,000 KB = 10 large photos = 10 minutes of music = 1 minute of video.


1 gigabyte (Gb) = 1000 megabytes (MBs) = an entire film/movie

1 terabyte (Tb) = 1000 GBs = MASSIVE = Pretty much only relevant for storage, external hard-drives etc.

Yes there are more...
...

In a nutshell

bytes - pretty much useless, like a few peas.

kilobytes (KB) like pages of text (text emails and small images would be measured in kilobytes) the most useful size online, not too small not too big.

megabytes, now we're getting heavy - large photos, music, 10 MBs or more for video

Maybe these analogies can help?

Animals:
ant, mouse, dog, elephant, blue whale

Food:
a grain of rice, a bowl of rice, a bag of rice, a sack of rice, a truck load of rice

Travel
a coin, hand bag/back pack, carry on luggage, suitcase, a plane load of luggage

To confuse things, images use more memory than text, and are measured in pixels, which do relate to size, but are not the same thing. Your MacBook Pro screen is at least 1200-1500 pixels wide, so that gives you an idea...

With the kids it can be helpful to get them to think of pixels in similar ways to mm, but this will lead to confusion later as they're actually smaller, but at least it's in the right ballpark. Like the image above looks about 8 cm wide on my screen, but is actually 400 px wide, not 80mm, but because higher resolution screens have smaller pixels you can't just compare using a ruler against the screen, this is obvious to geeks like me, but to normal people this is the kind of essential information that is rarely obvious.

As a rough guide:

• 10 pixels square = tiny, the size of 1 font character, like the letter 'o' = 1kb 
• 100 pixels square = the size of about 4 desktop icons = 10kb 
• 1000 pixels square = small/standard monitor (screen) size = 1 Mb 
• 10,000 pixels square = large or 'high definition' (size of a window), high resolution image/poster = 10 Mb 

So when Googling images, a pixel size of about 500px is ideal, 50px is too small (blurry) and images in the 1000s are probably too big (takes ages to load, and display).