eTwinning Zarco Project 2017/2018

Visit our new project on Sports & Healthy Eating Habits across Europe here. 

At Zarco we are working with France, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Romania, Poland and Turkey!

If you're interested, you can check all the data on the project here.

We miss you, Steve...

Credits: Charis Tsevis @ FlickR

Steve Jobs left us six years ago, but the world cannot forget his incredible genius. Without you, Steve, it's even more difficult to "Stay hungry. Stay Foolish."

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor and his mother, Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents. As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicon Valley. As a boy, Steve and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in Steve. While he has always been an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. A prankster in elementary school, Jobs's fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Steve tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

Not long after Jobs did enroll at Homestead High School (1971), he was introduced to his future partner, Steve Wozniak, through a friend of Wozniak's. Wozniak was attending the University of Michigan at the time. In a 2007 interview with ABC News, Wozniak spoke about why he and Steve clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world. ..." Apple Computers After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computers. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their entrepreneurial venture after Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. Wozniak conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publically traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion on the very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Scully of Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple's president.

However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC dominated business world. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counter culture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM compatible. Scully believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and executives began to phase him out.

In 1985, Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO to begin a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc. The following year Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money into the company. Pixar Studios went on to produce wildly popular animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4 billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.

Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1997 for $429 million. That same year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.

Much like Steve Jobs instigated Apple's success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pescovegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options. For nine months Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stocks if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs's confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, in subsequent years, Jobs disclosed little about his health.

Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook, iPod,  iPhone and iPad, all of which have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. In 2007, Apple's quarterly reports were the company's most impressive statistics to date. Stocks were worth a record-breaking $199.99 a share, and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion dollar profit, an $18 billion dollar surplus in the bank, and zero debt.

In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in America-second only to Wal-Mart. Half of Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million iPods sold and six billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been rated No. 1 in America's Most Admired Companies, and No. 1 amongst Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs's weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September 9, 2009.

In respect to his personal life, Steve Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family. What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents, claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 but, when she was a teenager, she came to live with her father.

In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.

On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc. announced that co-founder Steve Jobs had died. He was 56 years old at the time of his death.

Source: Bio.TrueStory (slightly adapted)

Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address in 2005

Ten Tech Terms We're Mixing Up

The Internet vs. the Web

The Internet is actually millions of computers interconnected in a global network. (Interconnected +

Network = Internet.) All of these computers can talk to each other to send and receive data around the world as fast as you can favorite a tweet.

The web, on the other hand, is the system where some (but not all) of that data is kept in the form of special documents. These documents are linked together and more commonly known to you and me as web pages. 

To put it simply, the internet is the equipment and connections, and the web is the information. Fun fact: While “world wide web” was the hottest term for the web a few years ago, Millennials prefer to call it “the cloud."

image credits: Skillcrush

HTML vs. CSS

Speaking of the internet, here’s a bit more about how the websites on it are made. HTML — or HyperText Markup Language — is the language used to write web pages. HTML is made up of “elements” (paragraphs, headers, lists, links, and the like), which give each web page structure and contain the content of the page itself (text, images, videos, and so on).

CSS — or Cascading Style Sheets — tell web browsers how to format and style an HTML document. In other words, CSS is what makes HTML look good. Using CSS, you can give a web page its own font, text styles, colors and, with the newest CSS version (CSS3), even multiple backgrounds, 3D transformations, and awesome animations.

To put it simply, HTML holds the content in place, and CSS makes it look pretty.

Front End vs. Back End

Now you know how websites are made, let’s talk about how they work. The front end of a website is the part that you can see. This includes HTML and CSS and all the other things you look at in your browser. Think Facebook posts that update or Google search terms that autocomplete—these are all thanks to the powers of the front-end programming language JavaScript.

The back end of a website is the part of a website that makes it work. It includes applications that tell websites what to do, servers where websites get data from, and databases where information websites use is stored.

On Twitter, for instance, the look of your feed is the front end, and all the data is stored in the back end.

App vs. Software

Speaking of telling computers what to do, you’ve probably heard the term “application” before. In a nutshell, an application, or app, is a program or set of instructions that you can use to do certain things on your iPhone or Android.

The general term for any instructions for your computer, tablet, or phone is software. So, apps are just one type of software. But, system software—like operating systems (think iOS7 or Windows 8), drivers (controls for your printer or speakers, for example), or utilities (like anti-virus or backup)—are a different type of software that run your computer as a whole and make it possible for you to use all those apps you’re addicted to.

That means: All apps are software but not all software is an app.

UX vs. UI

Even pros can get mixed up about these two abbreviations. UI — or User Interface — is how a product or website is laid out and how you interact with it: Where the buttons are, how big the fonts are, and how menus are organized are all elements of UI.

But UX — or User Experience — is how you feel about using a product or a website. So, your love for the way the new Apple Watch looks or your excitement that there’s finally a tablet-sized iPhone to watch those Corgi videos you’re obsessed with are reflections of UX.

So the new look of the Facebook news feed involves a change to UI, and the way you navigate that new page is the UX.

Source: MASHABLE

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and ICT Tools

Many teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in developing and structuring their teaching & learning experiences. Bloom's Digital taxonomy is an attempt to marry Bloom's revised taxonomy and the key verbs to digital approaches and tools. This is not a replacements to the verbs in the revised taxonomy, rather it suppliments and supports these by including recent developments, processes and tools.

Many of these tools that are FOSS (Free or Open Source Software). Click here for a comparison between Traditional and Digital approaches.

So what is Bloom's Taxonomy?

Benjamin Bloom developed, in 1956, while working at the University of Chicago, a theory on Educational Objectives. He proposed 3 domains or areas:

- Cognitive - person's ability to process and utilize information (thinking), this is what Bloom's Digital Taxonomy is based on;

- Affective - This is the role of feeling and attitudes in the learning/education process;

- Psychomotor - This is manipulative or physical skills.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a taxonomy of activities and behaviours that exemplify Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS). Bloom's allows use to rank and structure different classroom activities and plan the learning process. In 2001, Lorin Anderson and others revised Bloom's original work, creating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

Bloom’s and Revised Bloom's give us a learning process:

- Before you can understand a concept or fact you must remember it;

- To apply a concept you must understand it first;

- To evaluate a process you must have analysed it.Each layer builds on the previous. The creative process naturally incorporates these elements. You must remember (even if you are learning as you go), understand and apply these principles and concepts, analyse and evaluate the success of your design, the process and concept.

However, we don't need to start at lower order skills and then build piecemeal throught the taxonomy towards higher order thinking like creativity. By providing a suitably scaffolded task, the lower order skills of remembering and understanding become inherent in the learning process. By challenging our students to be analytical, evaluative or creative, they will within these processes develop understanding.

Bloom's Original taxonomy		Bloom's revised taxonomy
Evaluation	(HOTS)	Creating
Synthesis		Evaluating
Analysis		Analysing
Application		Applying
Comprehension		Understanding
Knowledge	(LOTS)	Remembering

HOTS is an abbreviation for Higher Order Thinking Skills and LOTS for Lower Order Thinking Skills.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. This diagram details Bloom's Revised Taxonomy with some of the original verbs.

Diagram of Bloom's revised Taxonomy showing the flow and process of learning. - A Churches

If you want to learn more about Bloom's Revised/Digital Taxonomy, read here.

Web 2.0 Tutorials

Without a doubt one of the best resources on the web for web2.0 Technologies is the commoncraft show. Lee LeFever's productions are clear, simple and to the point; most of all they are "In Plain English". Here are the links:

• http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter
• http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing
• http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_show
• http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-googledocs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/mylocation
• http://www.commoncraft.com/wetpaint

SOURCE: Educational Origami

Let's disconnect to connect to ourselves

The Importance of Using a Firewall

People often think about the best way to configure their computer to protect against threats, such as, worms and Trojan horses. They say they have installed antivirus protection and never open unexpected email attachments. But they wonder if that is enough. Antivirus protection is certainly an important part of aneffective protection solution. It has the ability to detect known threats as well as many new ones, but there is a second technology that can be added to help complete the picture: a firewall.

image credits: How Stuff Works

While antivirus software helps to protect the file system against unwanted programs, a firewall helps to keep attackers or external threats from getting access to your system in the first place. Most people are aware that worms often travel through email. They generally arrive as an attachment to an email that the user is enticed to click on by the text of the email itself. We call these threats “mass-mailing worms.” The best thing to do with these threats is simply to delete the email and not click on the attachment.

Other threats travel from computer to computer without the knowledgeof the user. They can find a computer that has lower security settings or unpatched vulnerabilities, and insert themselves onto that system without the user ever knowing what is happening. Many worms and Trojanhorses, often known as “bots”, travel this way. They utilize the Internet to find computers to infect. The user will never know that their system has been compromised because the threat enters the computer quietly.

This is exactly where a firewall can help protect you. The firewall monitors all network traffic and has the ability to identify and block unwanted traffic. Since most computers these days are connected to the Internet, attackers have many opportunities to find victim computers. These attackers probe other computers on the Internet to determine if they are vulnerable to various types of attacks. When they find a suitable computer, they can compromise it and insert themselves onto it. At that point the attacker can make the victim computer perform almost any task he desires. Attackers will often try to steal personal information for the purposes of many types of fraud. All of this activity takes place in the background without the user knowing what is happening.

There are two basic types of firewalls: client firewalls and appliance firewalls. A client firewall is software that resides on the computer itself and monitors all of the network traffic on that computer. An appliance firewall is a hardware device that is connected between the Internet and your computer. These devices are often used in small network environments where several computers need to share the same Internet connection. The small routers that many people use in their offices and homes usually have built-in firewalls. If you use a router, make sure it has a firewall. Both types of firewalls can keep the attackers from gaining unwanted access to your computer. Users who travel should always have a client firewall installed on their system. You don’t want to take any chances when you are connected to the Internet away from the office or home.

While antivirus software is a great tool to help keep you safe, adding a firewall will give the bad guys out there the one-two punch that will be a knockout.

Source: Symantec Official Blog (slightly abridged)

Here you can get an extense list of firewall software available online, both for paid and free download.