A nifty new iPad application called Flipboard has gone from fascination to mockery at startup speed, reports the Washington Post. This free program, which lets you read web stories and content shared on Twitter and Facebook in a magazine-style layout, earned a first round of assessments on July 21 that were remarkably positive–even for something featuring the winning buzzword-bingo combination of “iPad,” “social media” and “eReader.” The Wall Street Journal‘s Katherine Boehret, for example, wrote that after two months of using early versions of Flipboard on Apple’s tablet computer, she found it a “a beautiful, visual way” to keep up with the web. On Twitter, Flipboard had no bigger fan than veteran tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who posted at least 28 tweets early on July 21 about the app…
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Schools beef up security for web applications
K-12 schools and colleges are adding extra layers of security to web applications that are being used for everything from eMail service to group assignments. The extra security is particularly desired as administrators use the applications to store sensitive information that could compromise student and faculty privacy.
Google Apps has risen to prominence in education’s move toward web-based tools that store massive amounts of data and allow for collaboration. Google announced in February that 7 million students—about half of all college students in the U.S.—now use the company’s applications, such as Google Sites, Google Docs, and Gmail.
With invaluable information stored online and vulnerable to any hacker who can figure out a single password, administrators are looking for ways to ensure that student and educator data are kept safe with more complex security methods.…Read More