Educational apps for children

There are many educational mobile apps for children to learn and play. You can check out this article to see what's the best educational apps for your child.

Children can listen to stories, play music games and etc.. This can boost children creativity and gain some basic knowledge.

However, many parents usually download all those apps in their phone, Ipad or tablets and let their children to play with mobile devices. It has caused children more rely on mobile devices and facilitate the antisocial phenomena when they grow up. Parents should always accompany their children to learn and not the mobile devices. It is ok to let them learn from these apps but please make sure that set a limit for example 15 minutes per day.

Lastly, please think before when you buy your child a smartphone or mobile devices. Don't hesitate to refer to this website for a guide whether to buy your child a mobile phone.

Author: Chan Yoon Wei (B1402005)

It's All About Instagramming

Instagram is a popular photo-sharing app for smartphones. It is a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.

Today, you can post photos and videos up to 15 seconds in length through the app or upload from your device. Besides, you have a whole bunch of extra filter options up to 24 filters you can choose to apply to photos, while 13 for videos. Not to mentioned, you can adjust the brightness, contrast, warmth, saturation, highlights, sharpness and cover frame if it’s a video and editing features.

There are some people thinking that posting just pictures on Instagram will end up encouraging the “selfie” trend amongst the society as they spend too much time on capturing photos of themselves and editing. This phenomenon will lead an individual to be obsessed over looks and body figure especially when they frequently compare themselves with those instagrammers that have good looks and good body.

Furthermore, Instagram could be a great platform for the food hunter to seek about good food. As we noticed that, instagrammers love sharing a variety images of their favourite dishes from lots of different locations on Instagram With this, their fellow followers would then know where they are enjoying the meal by tagging their location and later recommend it to their friends and family.

Reference kindly refer to this article.


Author: KOH YEE CHIANG (B1400838)

shopping with instagram and pinterest app!

source:iridescently.com/stilesclothing/

Recently, instagram has become a platform where online shops post their pictures on instagram to showcase their items for sale to their customers instead of a blog. Customers are able to make their order by dropping these online shops a personal messages on instagram, as simple as that! Also, the sellers are also able to know their customers liking's or most popular item etc by looking at the number of "likes" on a particular picture featuring the item they are selling. 

According to this article , Pinterest has also began to evolve with new shopping features with their new tools on their website. 

source: blog.trendshop.com

Pinterest has made this tool user friendly by allowing users to search for a product by price to tailor items to a given user and their budget with easy payment methods such as credit card. 

Pinterest and instagram have certainly made shopping online a whole lot interesting and easier!

Author: Joohijit Kaur (B1203073)

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

source: appadvice.com

Facebook and Apple have developed their apps to become places to get the daily news. The Pew Research Center found that almost a third of adults in the United States used Facebook to read or watch the news.  This allows users to spend more time on the app. Facebook has made the news more reader-friendly by allowing the news to be read on the app in a mini-tab on the browser. 

source: fordhamram.com

The rise in such news apps brings a threat to more traditional news sources and one might even question the authenticity of the news read on social media apps like Facebook.   Even if tech companies like Apple are merely providing a news platform for already established news sources, the companies are making judgement calls about story selection and placement which encroaches journalism territory and that could have consequences on the future of journalism.

The article this post is based on can be found here.

Author: Shasha Fernandez (B1401973)

A Very Pinteresting Wedding

The world of Pinterest is one of fresh ideas and abundant creativity. It is a dreamers haven. Users come to Pinterest to post and organize new ideas and to browse through other people’s ideas on anything from home decor to food.

source: shewearsmanyhats.com

This article explores both sides of the coin with the app. While the app does offer insightful ideas for that upcoming wedding or keeping up with new fashion trends, it can also become a distraction for users as they waste time endlessly browsing. Getting addicted to Pinterest is definitely a big concern with using the app. One could spend hours and hours just browsing through things that just look pretty. It is like window shopping but you can curl up in bed and browse away. 

The term ‘Pinterest wedding’ has become a common phrase used as many people, --

engaged or otherwise—plan their weddings with similar styles. If someone is not even in a relationship but is obsessed with the wedding boards on Pinterest, it might be a bit of an unnecessary waste of time. However, it does indeed offer up countless creative ideas and could be useful when one finally does have to plan that wedding.

source: huffingtonpost.com

Links referenced in this post can be found here and here.

Author: Shasha Fernandez (B1401973)

TED unlimited talks

TED, Ideas Worth Spreading.

Now you can listen or precisely - watch various type of talks in your phone. TED is an apps which contains over 100+ topics for example adventure, DNA, economics and leadership.

Let's say you only have 5 minutes while waiting for public transport, you can actually watch a talk in that short period of time. In this case, TED has provided a function which you can choose any talks by choosing the time you have.

Clearly, TED is no harmful for all of us. We can gain knowledge. It's a good way to learn more but we should adventure this wonderful by ourselves rather than sitting on the sofa and watching videos and assume that we knew everything. 

For your interest, kindly refer to this article for the 15 terrific talks for new media students. 

Author: Chan Yoon Wei (B1402005)

Issues of Social Media (fueled by Mobile Apps) Part 2

Social media creates new issues for Malaysians. One of which is online harrassment. According to this article, The level of online harassment is reportedly high at above 70%, especially for children calling other children mean names, posting improper messages and inappropriate photos. As many as 26% of all schoolchildren reported that they had been bullied online, with children aged 13 to 15 being bullied the most. The survey done (as seen in the article) shows that children are extremely exposed to cyberbullying and they take little protection against such an issue. This is extremely disturbing as Foong Cheng Leong, an advocate and solicitor mentions some cases of online harassment in his blog. 

Also, social media may create a new problem for Malaysians. This issue may be explained to our readers through a video by John Oliver, an English comedian who is the host of Last Week Tonight, a satirical weekly news report. 

He first discusses about women being harassed online and proceed to a huge issue of 'revenge porn'. Revenge porn is sexually explicit media that is distributed without the consent of the individual(s) involved. This typically happens when a partner who is bitter about the break up of a relationship posts naked pictures sent by the other partner during their relationship to porn websites without the knowledge and consent of the other partner, causing humiliation and may even ruin the lives of the victim (lose their jobs, their families or turn to suicide). 

Our group agree that this is not an issue of Malaysian society yet, or at least it is not an overblown controversial problem that Malaysians face due to the more conservative culture of Malaysians but it is not an exception to this problem. It may be an issue of the future or it may be an issue we face now. We agree that there must exist criminal rules in the country to protect individuals from such a crime. Also, we propose that tighter regulations should exist for cyberbullying to prevent harassment or stalking, since it is a general consensus among us that all citizens and netizens should feel secure in their own country and in their own home.

Photo credits:

http://kalw.org/post/your-call-who-responsible-preventing-online-harassment

http://tribune.com.pk/story/51428/poverty-drives-man-to-murder-suicide/

Author: Florence Chong (B1402193)