Remote court transcription technology enables virtual court appearances — from abajournal.com by Nicole Black

Excerpts:

That’s why it’s imperative to make certain remote options are available for all aspects of legal work since doing so is the only way to guarantee the justice system doesn’t come to a grinding halt. One way to prevent that is to take advantage of the virtual deposition transcription tools I discussed in last month’s column. In that article, I provided an overview of virtual deposition transcription products and services that rely on videoconferencing tools and software platforms to facilitate remote depositions.

Another way business continuity has been maintained since March 2020 is via virtual court proceedings. Remote court appearances are now more common since courts periodically shifted to partial or fully remote operations throughout the pandemic. Many judges have become accustomed to and appreciate the convenience of virtual court proceedings, and many expect them to continue even after the pandemic ends.

Because all signs point to the continuation of virtual court proceedings, I promised in last month’s article that I would focus on remote court proceeding options in this column. These include software platforms and artificial intelligence language-processing tools that facilitate remote court proceedings.

Nicole’s article mentioned the following vendor/product:

Live Litigation -- Remote Solutions for Attending and Participating in Depositions, Trials, Hearings, Arbitrations, Mediations, Witness Prep, and more.

 

How to make competency-based education possible through an intelligent learning platform — from blog.neolms.com by Ioana Solea

Excerpt:

Competency-based education plays an essential role in this endeavor. As its name suggests, this type of learning focuses on individual competency. It promotes a learner-centric approach in which students get from level A to level B after acquiring and demonstrating mastery of certain skills.

Competency-based learning is easier to implement when you have the right tools. An intelligent learning platform (ILP) is the ideal option. This technology already incorporates all the features you need to implement a competency-based learning model.

Learn how an ILP enables competency-based education.

 

What Educators Need to Know About Assistive Tech Tools: Q&A with Texthelp CEO — from thejournal.com by Kristal Kuykendall and Texthelp CEO Martin McKay

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

THE Journal: What are some examples of the types of assistive technology tools now available for K–12 schools?
McKay: There are a broad range of disabilities, and accordingly, a broad range of learning and access difficulties that assistive technology can help with. Just considering students with dyslexia — since that is the largest group among students who can benefit from assistive tech tools — the main problems they have are around reading comprehension and writing. Assistive technology can provide text-to-speech, talking dictionaries, picture dictionaries, and text simplification tools to help with comprehension.

It’s important that these tools need to work everywhere — not just in their word processor. Assistive technology must work in their learning management systems, and must work in their online assessment environment, so that the student can use the assistive tech tools not only in class, but at home as they work on their homework, and perhaps most importantly on test day when they are using a secure assessment environment.

 

We need to use more tools — that go beyond screen sharing — where we can collaborate regardless of where we’re at. [Christian]

From DSC:
Seeing the functionality in Freehand — it makes me once again think that we need to use more tools where faculty/staff/students can collaborate with each other REGARDLESS of where they’re coming in to partake in a learning experience (i.e., remotely or physically/locally). This is also true for trainers and employees, teachers and students, as well as in virtual tutoring types of situations. We need tools that offer functionalities that go beyond screen sharing in order to collaborate, design, present, discuss, and create things.  (more…)

 

Innovative and practical applications of the metaverse — from mckinsey.com

In this episode of the At the Edge podcast, McKinsey expert Richard Ward speaks with McKinsey’s Mina Alaghband.

Excerpts:

One of the things that we’ve learned during the pandemic is that if you put these metaverse design rooms up on the internet, your clients and other expert engineers can log in remotely, and the experience takes on the quality of Zoom in 3-D, which allows a new level of engineering to happen. The beauty of it is that people are able to do highly productive engineering design work without getting on an airplane. And that has a lot of rollover value for what we’re doing long term.

One of the great lessons we’ve had from the pandemic, as horrible as it’s been, is that things that people had said were impossible for decades are now possible. Like the idea that you can’t possibly have everybody not be in the office—it’s been proven wrong.

Also relevant/see:

 

Google TalkBack: An Overview of Android’s Free Screen Reader — from boia.org

Excerpt:

TalkBack is Google’s free screen reader for Android devices. The software responds to familiar touch and swipe commands, allowing users to interact with websites and apps. When activated, TalkBack announces where the user’s focus is located, enabling people to control their phones, tablets, and other Android devices without using visual cues. In certain apps, users can input other touch and voice commands.

As part of our series of articles on assistive technologies, we’ll review some of TalkBack’s unique features — and provide tips for using the software to evaluate mobile accessibility.

 

Radar trends to watch: April 2022 — from oreillky.com by Mike Loukides
Developments in Programming, Biology, Hardware, and More

5 Digital Transformation Themes for Higher Education — from
Explore key topics and event recordings from our latest deep dive into Digital Transformation in Higher Education.

The semiconductor decade: A trillion-dollar industry — from mckinsey.com by Ondrej Burkacky, Julia Dragon, and Nikolaus Lehmann

Drilling down into individual subsegments, about 70 percent of growth is predicted to be driven by just three industries: automotive, computation and data storage, and wireless.

Addendum later on 4/8/22:

 

The AR Roundup: March 2022 — from linkedin.com by Tom Emrich

Excerpt:

Every month I round up what you may have missed in Augmented Reality including the latest stats, funding news and launch announcements and more. Here is what happened in augmented reality between March 1-31, 2022.

“The metaverse is no longer a single virtual world or even a cluster of virtual worlds. It’s the entire system of virtual and augmented worlds,” Chalmers tells me over Zoom. “Where the old metaverse was like a platform on the internet, the new metaverse is more like the internet as a whole, just the immersive internet.”

~ David Chalmers, Philosopher and Author of Reality+

 

 

Best Drones for Education: Building, Flying, and Coding — from eduporium.com

Excerpt:

Teaching with drones in education holds a number of possibilities that range from introducing piloting basics to helping students explore drone uses and careers as well as how coding ties in. Whether in a STEM program, a dedicated drone class, or in CTE courses, students can explore practical STEM concepts, gain hands-on experience, and more. When it comes to the best drones for education, however, knowing what you’re looking for is incredibly important. There are some big names, like the Parrot Mambo Fly and the Sky Viper line, but our team has certain requirements when it comes to our recommendations

 

45 Next Generation Learning Tools That Kids Will Love — from ireviews.com with thanks to Alex Ward for this resource

Excerpts:

There’s a wide range of tools designed to support curriculum and help teachers and students achieve their goals. These are our top picks for school students of every age, due to their impressive functionality and simple integration into the classroom.

 


From DSC:
Below is a sample screenshot from the Elementary school resources section. They also have resources for middle schoolers and high schoolers.


45 Next Generation Learning Tools That Kids Will Love

 

Technology Trends for 2022 — from oreilly.com
What O’Reilly Learning Platform Usage Tells Us About Where the Industry Is Headed

Excerpt:

It’s been a year since our last report on the O’Reilly learning platform. Last year we cautioned against a “horse race” view of technology. That caution is worth remembering: focus on the horse race and the flashy news and you’ll miss the real stories. While new technologies may appear on the scene suddenly, the long, slow process of making things that work rarely attracts as much attention. We start with an explosion of fantastic achievements that seem like science fiction—imagine, GPT-3 can write stories!—but that burst of activity is followed by the process of putting that science fiction into production, of turning it into real products that work reliably, consistently, and fairly. AI is making that transition now; we can see it in our data. But what other transitions are in progress? What developments represent new ways of thinking, and what do those ways of thinking mean? What are the bigger changes shaping the future of software development and software architecture? This report is about those transitions.

O’Reilly Answers
We’re very excited about O’Reilly Answers, the newest product on the platform. Answers is an intelligent search that takes users directly to relevant content, whether that’s a paragraph from a book, a snippet of a video, or a block of code that answers a question. Rather than searching for an appropriate book or video and skimming through it, you can ask a specific question like “How do you flatten a list of lists in Python?” (a question I’ve asked several times). 


Also see:


 
 

Now we just need a “Likewise TV” for learning-related resources! [Christian]

Likewise TV Brings Curation to Streaming — from lifewire.com by Cesar Aroldo-Cadenas
And it’s available on iOS, Android, and some smart TVs

All your streaming services in one place. One search. One watchlist. Socially powered recommendations.

Entertainment startup Likewise has launched a new recommendations hub that pulls from all the different streaming platforms to give you personalized picks.

Likewise TV is a streaming hub powered by machine learning, people from the Likewise community, and other streaming services. The service aims to do away with mindlessly scrolling through a menu, looking for something to watch, or jumping from one app to another by providing a single location for recommendations.

Note that Likewise TV is purely an aggregator.


Also see:

Likewise TV -- All your streaming services in one place. One search. One watchlist. Socially powered recommendations.

 


From DSC:
Now we need this type of AI-based recommendation engine, aggregator, and service for learning-related resources!

I realize that we have a long ways to go here — as a friend/former colleague of mine just reminded me that these recommendation engines often miss the mark. I’m just hoping that a recommendation engine like this could ingest our cloud-based learner profiles and our current goals and then present some promising learning-related possibilities for us. Especially if the following graphic is or will be the case in the future:


Learning from the living class room


Also relevant/see:

From DSC:
Some interesting/noteworthy features:

  • “The 32- inch display has Wi-Fi capabilities to supports multiple streaming services, can stream smartphone content, and comes with a removable SlimFit Cam.”
  • The M8 has Wi-Fi connectivity for its native streaming apps so you won’t have to connect to a computer to watch something on Netflix. And its Far Field Voice mic can be used w/ the Always On feature to control devices like Amazon Alexa with your voice, even if the monitor is off.
  • “You can also connect devices to the monitor via the SmartThings Hub, which can be tracked with the official SmartThings app.”

I wonder how what we call the TV (or television) will continue to morph in the future.


Addendum on 3/31/22 from DSC:
Perhaps people will co-create their learning playlists…as is now possible with Spotify’s “Blend” feature:

Today’s Blend update allows you to share your personal Spotify playlists with your entire group chat—up to 10 users. You can manually invite these friends and family members to join you from in the app, then Spotify will create a playlist for you all to listen to using a mixture of everyone’s music preferences. Spotify will also create a special share card that everyone in the group can use to save and share the created playlist in the future.


 

Tinkerhunts — from engagetheirminds.com by Terri Eichholz

Excerpt:

For anyone new to 3d design, Tinkercad is the perfect entry level program. It’s free, web-based, and contains lots of tutorials. As a teacher, you can create classes and assign projects that you can oversee through a dashboard. I’ve used it with students from 2nd grade through 12th, so it’s quite a versatile tool.

That’s why I think these Tinkerhunts from HL Modtech (Mike Harmon, @HLTinkercad) are pretty genius. In the first one, he gives kudos to his student, Kingston, who first gave him the idea for these three-dimensional virtual scavenger hunts.

Also see:

Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use web app that equips the next generation of designers and engineers with the foundational skills for innovation: 3D design, electronics, and coding!

 

The 20 best dyslexia resources for homeschoolers — from raisinglifelonglearners.com Colleen Kessler

Excerpt:

Homeschooling a child with dyslexia can be a challenge, especially when you are struggling to find resources. I believe homeschooling is the best possible educational choice for your dyslexic child. You just need to right education and support. These are 20 of the best dyslexia resources out there for homeschoolers.

Also relevant/see:

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian