Let's try Arduino in High School!

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform that is fantastic to create interactive objects or environments. Arduino is cheap and very easy to use, so is a very powerful tool for artists, designers and hobbyists. And it is an amazing tool to teach electronics and programming. Let's try Arduino in High School!

Here you have "Arduino The Documentary":

Duolingo: learn a language for free and translate the web

Imagine a good free program to learn a language. Imagine that this good program is free because when you are using it you are working for them: they use the answers of your exercises to translate the web. That's Duolingo, one of the best web pages to learn a language. You can use Duolingo in your browser or in your smartphone, because there are versions for iPhone and Android. So let's recommend Duolingo to our students!

In this TED talk the founder of Duolingo, a mathematician from Guatemala called Luis von Ahn, tells us about how he invented Duolingo and Captcha:

Aaron Swartz

How Aaron helped build the Internet

Six minutes English: speak any language instantly

I recommend you listen to this conversation from the BBC about how to communicate easily in other languages thanks to the technology:
speak any language instantly

Kony 2012

Hi everyone! Have you heard about the Kony video? At the beginning of the year we talked about viral videos, with the example of the University of California Davis pepper spray incident. Last week, a video went viral even more quickly--in fact, "Kony 2012", below, has become the fastest-growing viral video in history. (This article, in the Guardian, explores the implications of this kind of "virality".) At the time of writing this post, it has more than 74 million views.

The video aims to* raise awareness about Kony, a Ugandan warlord whose rebel army is known for abducting children and turning them into sex slaves and child soldiers. I thought we could talk about it on Wednesday in English Breakfast. It is quite a bit longer than your average popular video, at almost a half hour, but if you watch the first ten minutes and last three or so, you get a general sense of it (it includes English subtitles). Alternatively, you could read this article in the LA Times which presents some of the criticisms of the awareness campaign (or this shorter one in simpler English).



Some questions to consider: What do you think about the use of this kind of social media and marketing to raise awareness about such serious issues? Do you have any problems with how the issue was presented? Do you think the campaign is/will be effective, or do you think that ultimately it could do more harm than good?

*tries to, intends to

Learning English through multimedia

Hello englishbreakfast team,

I recommend you this website to learn English through videos, featured games.
http://lingual.net/


Enjoy it!

The Future of Technology

This 1995 Newsweek article dismisses the idea that the internet would fundamentally change the way we do things.

"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities . . . Baloney[*] . . .The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

*Baloney = nonsense

How have we gotten so far? Which of the articles' predictions have come true, or totally missed the mark? Going into the future, what do you predict?

Check out this TED talk for a glance at the direction we might be heading.