EdTechSR Ep 238 Chegg Extortion Revealed

Welcome to episode 238 ("Chegg Extortion Revealed") of the EdTech Situation Room from November 10, 2021, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed a story of extortion via the "homework help" website Chegg, the freemium future of Notability for iPadOS, and the social media lessons learned because of the (relatively) recent eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii. The benefits of social media powered news reading with Twitter lists, the implications of Facebook's name change to "Meta," YouTube's decision to hide "dislike" video counts, and Google's push for more 2 step verification on accounts were also highlighted. Plummeting Chromebook sales in advance of Black Friday sales, the question of whether a Chromebook with detachable screens are better than iPads, and the broadband provisions of the recently signed infrastructure bill in the US Congress were discussed. The official renaming of Google's smart home initiative as "Google Home," Microsoft's Surface Laptop SE Chromebook competitor, and media literacy challenges thanks to the proliferation of fake local news sites and disinformation campaigns about the COVID19 death toll were the last topics for this show. Geeks of the Week included "Pet Portraits" from Google Arts & Culture and "YouTube Copyright School," which amazingly just takes 4 minutes to attend. 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. Stay savvy and safe!