EdTechSR Ep 244 Join our SubStack

Welcome to episode 244 (“Join our SubStack”) of the EdTech Situation Room from January 5, 2022, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed the case of two California teachers secretly recorded talking about LGBTQ student outreach, who used student laptop monitoring software to identify prospective club members. The DuckDuckGo privacy desktop web browser and Americans' distrust of social media companies were also discussed. On the Google front, the new capability to host up to 500 meeting participants in a Google Meet videoconference for paying Google Workspace customers, changes to the "Your News Update" for the Google Assistant, and the potential dangers (according to the EFF) of the Google Chrome "Manifest V3" user tracking standard were highlighted. UBlock Origin as a free ad-blocking extension for Chrome and FireFox was extolled / recommend, and Google's announced "major improvements" to Android were explored. Lastly, some tales of algorithmic poor choices by automated podcast advertisement selection programs were discussed. Geeks of the week included MapCrunch, James Webb space telescope links, and a good (but troubling) podcast about fascism in America by Vx Conversations. Our show was live streamed and archived simultaneously on YouTube Live as well as our Facebook Live page via StreamYard.com, and compressed to a smaller video version (about 100MB) on AmazonS3 using Handbrake software. Please follow us on Twitter @edtechSR for updates, and join us LIVE on Wednesday nights (normally) if you can at 10 pm Eastern / 9 pm Central / 8 pm Mountain / 7 pm Pacific or 3 am UTC. All shownotes are available on http://edtechSR.com/links. Please sign up for our NEW SubStack newsletter to receive all our show links each week in your inbox, including links we are not able to discuss on edtechsr.substack.com. Stay savvy and safe!