Smartboards

The school finally had most of the latest shipment of Smartboards installed, and except for maybe three classrooms including mine, all teachers have a set of Smartboard with projector, document, camera, speakers, and mini Mac now. I got all of these, but the wiring and projector still need to be installed.

In my previous school I used Smartboards, but not to the full extent demonstrated by our tech coordinator here, such as saving our scribbles using Notebook software. Until then I’ve only used it as screen for presentations, videos, and to show students where to click when using applications.

Lately I’ve used the Notebook software as “lab assistant.” The step by step instructions are posted with accompanying screenshots, and while I’m busy in one part of the computer lab, the students who are ahead or behind in the activity can go up to the board and click on the appropriate slide to show them what to to do next and how.

My husband is finally seeing some need to ask for one, too. Because he shares classroom with the high school band teacher, he needs to save his announcements and music on the board.

Here are some helpful links worth checking out.
http://technology.usd259.org/resources/whiteboards/smartlessons.htm
http://www.kenton.k12.ky.us/SmartBoard/smartboardindex.htm
http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/smartboard.htm
http://www.internet4classrooms.com/smart_board.htm
http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html
http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Ed+Resource/Lesson+activities/
http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Search/Sitemap.htm

New Job, New Challenges

I got a new job, new home, new country — my husband and I are now teaching at a Mac school in Nigeria, yikes! The problem is all my previous lessons are stored in a Windows PC compatible portable hard drive.

I could not even access the online files, because those are in password-protected sites managed by my previous school; and all old lessons are archived and no longer available to former teachers.

On the bright side, all teachers get MacBooks at our current school, and we carry this with us from home to work. I can even take attendance cradling it in my arm as I go around the computer lab. By the end of this month every classroom will also have a Smartboard with mini Macs.

The next step for me is to find a web hosting and course management site for my personal use. This way I have online backups the next time I change jobs.

My First Screencast

As part of my assignment for Module 6 in the online course Technology Innovations with the University of Wisconsin – Stout, I had to create a podcast and screencast for the first time. As instructed this screencast is now on TeacherTube, the educational alternative to YouTube, which is blocked in many schools including mine.

This is about using the Gaussian Blur effect in Photoshop. I embedded the video from Google, because the instructions for doing so with TeacherTube is much more complicated.

This screencast was created using Camtasia Recorder, an old program I acquired in 2001. The latest version, called Camtasia Studio has a lot more features such as being able to record your own narration and focus or zoom in on the screen. But as I am more comfortable with CR, and CS kept shutting down on me due to some memory error — even though I shut down and restarted my PC — I think I’ll stick with Camtasia Record for a while. I did have to use Audacity and MovieMaker for the narration. You don’t have to tell me, I hate my voice and the way I talk, too — why the heck do I pause in the wrong places???

CoverItLive — My First Attempt at Live Blogging

I’m doing a presentation on Friday about Web 2.0 Tools for the (Smartboard) Classroom and Virtual School. While doing my preparation and research on Classroom 2.0 I stumbled on a familiar name — Jeff Utecht — followed the links to his website and blog, and saw he was using CoverItLive for the EARCOS Conference currently happening in Bangkok. The idea of Live Blogging intrigued me, so I signed up for an account and here we are.

Click Here

Shift Happens

I’m taking advantage of my sabbatical this year to enrol in two online courses with the University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of these courses is about media and visual literacy. I thought it was just a class to learn about using video in the classroom, something that I have not fully explored in my 8 years as teacher. But it is more than that. When taken in the context of 21st century skills, it is not enough that today’s students learn how to be consumers of technology, they also need to learn to analyze, evaluate, and create technology products and ideas. One video refer to them as “digital learners.”

Some of my classmates, who teach or work as media specialists in US schools, say that chatting, blogging, and social networking sites are usually banned in their schools. Some have the latest tools like Smartboards and computer carts, while others complain about having to compete with other teachers for the use of computer labs. We’re lucky at my school in this regard. We have wireless Internet on campus, four computer labs, Smartboards in almost every classroom, laptops for teachers, and subscription to educational resources like Web-based grade books, Turnitin, and two course management systems: Edline and Blackboard.

In one of the discussions I wrote that we teachers really don’t have a choice but become media literate ourselves. I know I want to, or risk becoming irrelevant to my students, who bring their homework in Ipods and chat with me to ask about their assignments. They are digital learners and this is how technology can be used for school, not just personal entertainment. I’m looking forward to learn more from my two classes. I’ve used many of these tools personally, but need direction and ideas on how to effectively make RSS feeds, tag cloud searching, storyboards, and iGoogle a part of the curriculum.

Those who believe that students should still be learning the “traditional way” using books, pencil, and paper can watch this video and reflect.

There are many versions, but I like this one the best. It’s what our school board and superintendent showed to teachers, students, and parents last year. You can look up the other versions in YouTube or the website http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/

Fotopages

One of my not so successful experiments with the Yearbook class of 2005-2006 had the students creating their own accounts in Fotopages. It was not only to encourage them to take pictures and develop their photography skills. I believed then and still believe now that students, and people in general, need to practice caption writing. The reason why it was not successful was that the students hated writing captions, and most of the guys were not interested in taking pictures. Some of them hated the assignment so much — to update their photo blog weekly — that they asked me not to do it again when they signed up for the class the following year.

Things have changed much since Facebook came to our school. Not only do they take a bunch of photos with their mobile phones, they also upload these within hours on their Facebook accounts … sometimes with descriptive titles and captions, but not always.

I would really like to do this exercise again, although I don’t want to teach Yearbook anymore. And Fotopages is still the best site for this. Sure I have paid accounts with Flickr and Webshots, but the nice feature about students using Fotopages is their site can be password-protected, but viewers don’t have to open an account to view the students’ sites. This is how I set up my personal account which is now my baby’s photo blog, so family and relatives can watch him grow.

Features that I like include the comments and smiley faces, as well as the restored Statistics page. Unlike Flickr, however, the comments are per post not per photo. You won’t know either how many views a picture gets, unless you post one picture only per day. The other thing that I don’t like about Fotopages is their Most Popular Fotopages, because “popular” is not synonymous to good photography here. So I’m pleased to see that they added the “Editors’ Choice” section, even though none of my photos since 2004 have ever been selected.

TiltViewer: An Interactive Flash Tool for your Web Gallery

One of my WebDesign students — the best in his class — is doing his final website project on the school’s art department featuring artworks by K-12 students. I encouraged him to use Flash so the images will be dynamic and interactive, even though I was never successful and thus never liked using Flash (except for user-friendly widgets). So after trying different free tools on the Web he finally settled for the “TiltViewer 3D Flash flash image viewing application” by Airtight Interactive.

In my opinion it’s the best app for artworks compared to the others that he tried. One can zoom in by clicking, and admire the artist’s brush or pen strokes or even the texture of pastel. By clicking on the rotate symbol you can view information (or the caption) such as the title and artist on the back of the each image. Move the mouse around and you get the 3D tilting effect. The one improvement I would like for this interactive tool is a zoom control panel, similar to the ones used for maps.

Twittering

(Apr. 29) I started my account with Twitter three days ago hmmm, boring so far. I’m not enjoying it as much as Flock or Ma.gnolia, the two other accounts I opened recently, even though it’s not fair to compare because they’re not the same thing. And I haven’t found any of my friends in Twitter yet, nor am I inclined to send invites to everyone in my address book. Oh wait, my 100+ friends in Facebook are already keeping me updated about their status, and so am I — except if we do it on daily basis other people start to think we don’t have a life. And I have not connected my mobile phone yet (it’s been dead for a week because I keep forgetting to recharge it), so I suppose I’m again not fully utilizing Twitter. Okay, I’ll wait and see what happens. I just changed my Facebook status to “looking for friends in twitter.” Lord, what if I don’t have friends???

Webshots on my Desktop

(Apr. 24) This is what my school desktop looks like right now. I just replaced the wallpaper, a collage of my baby, so you can see the desktop calendar better. This is from Webshots, and I downloaded and have been using it on all my computers since, oh maybe 2001. This is because I find the calendar so helpful, and of course the high quality photos from Webshots are like eye candy. In the past my favorite wallpaper and screensaver are photos of nature, cats, baby animals, and travel destinations. But I’ve also loaded our own travel photos, and more recently, pictures of our little boy.

If you noticed the little sticky that’s a shareware ($10 if you keep it) from MoRUN.net. I’m so absent-minded I like having this sticky on top of everything. After a while it does get annoying, especially when I’m always dragging it out of the way to read an e-mail or Web page. But it sure comes in handy.

Download Webshots Desktop

Join the Flock

(Apr. 23) My husband and I use different browsers; helps eliminate or reduce conflicts when one of us inadvertently downloads a virus and also allows us to maintain separate bookmarks or favorites. I use Firefox, he uses Netscape. We both use IE occasionally, but avoid it when accessing multimedia sites. Personally, I just don’t like the streamlined menu bar on the latest version because I sometimes need to use History or Stop. At least I remembered F5 is the refresh key.

But Netscape is retiring, sob sob (my first ever GUI browser and web page authoring tool) — and my husband received notice to switch to Firefox or Flock. We’ve never heard of Flock until then, but I got curious. I checked out the reviews, liked what I saw, and have been using it since.

I love it! Just days before I learned about Flock I was trying to create a web page that will have links to all my e-mail, blogs, and favorite news sites … something prettier than my Bloglines. So it’s great to have a browser like Flock where tabs and icons so I can view my Facebook, Flickr, e-mail, blog, and bookmarking sites with one click or one glance. There are also plug-ins so one can upload photos and videos or post blogs to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, yes — Xanga, and a more.

Some of my favorite features: The media bar allows me to view the latest photos of my Flickr and Facebook contacts. I can bookmark/add my favorite pages to my computer as well as del.icio.us and/or ma.gnolia accounts. This is very useful because I use more than one computer. I can subscribe to news, blog, and comments feeds, then see everything in one page.

So if you’re a multi-tasker with short attention span like me, Flock might be the right browser for you. You will love how all the most common tasks on the Web are integrated like a one-stop shop. It doesn’t support chat, VOIP, and video conferencing yet but since I hardly use those it’s okay.

Download Flock