Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the Apple Leadership Symposium in Columbus Ohio. The days events included what I would call a Keynote from Jon Corippo (@jcorippo). Jon is an Apple Distinguished Educator and he shared a lot of insight about reforming the way we think about education and he also showed some amazing work from Minarets High School students. Jon recommended some very good thoughts and ideas. I really like his way of starting out the school year.
YouCanBook.Me
YouCanBook.me is a site that takes your Google calendar to the next level for scheduling things like appointments, labs, conferences, and events that occur at your school. YCBM is a free service as long as you keep the logo on your calendar or you can pay about $1 a month to get rid of it.
Easily synch PDF’s with your IOS Device
Last week while at an Apple Sys Admin seminar they showed this cool trick to add “Send to Itunes” as an option in the PDF section in OSX. This when you select “To Itunes” from the printing menu next time you sync your IOS Device (Ipad, Ipod Touch, Iphone) whatever you selected will be in PDF form and located in Ibooks.
Creating “MailTo:” Hyperlinks in Google Docs
The whole point of cloud computing and Google Docs is to make your life easier. Recently I moved our teacher email list that was on our website to a Google Spreadsheet and used the Publish feature to make it available on our website. The issue with the spreadsheet was you were unable to click on the email address to automatically open your email program and set the To: portion in your program. Until now.
The features you love now synched to the cloud!
As of Feb 24th Google has been offering a Microsoft office plug-in that allows you to save docs directly from Office products to your Google Docs account.This is going to help administrators that have Google Apps implemented in their respective districts. This gives us the features that we are used to in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and save everything on the cloud. Instead of teaching people how to create Google Docs from the ground up we can start with the plugin and work our way to the cloud.
Ipad. Not just for content consumption any more
Today Apple announced the new Ipad, the Ipad 2. Steve Jobs presented the new device on stage in San Francisco at the yerba buena center for the arts. I have been following the ipad for a while and its use in education. Until this point my view was the ipad is a content consumtion device instead of a content creation device. The new ipad changes my view. I still think that the ipad is not the best for typing but with the addition of the dual camera’s, imovie, and garage band i think it has a better chance at finding its way into school’s.
Interactive Whiteboard as a Green Screen
This is something cool to give a try. With the growing number of interactive whiteboards that are showing up in classrooms teachers are finding more creative ways to use them. While playing around one day, I found that the IWB can be used as a green screen. All you have to do is create a new page, pick the closest color to lime that you can find. Fill the whole page with this color and switch to full screen mode.
Be sure that you stay out of the way of your projector or your body parts may disappear in the middle of your movie.
This is a great way to take your classroom video’s to a new level. Give it a shot! For ideas for green screen’s in the classroom take a look at this page.
For chroma keying tutorials (MAC) take a look at this.
Also for a good quality and cheap camera take a look at “Digital Wish”
How are you going to use this in your classroom?
Thanks
TJ
Multiple Gmail Accounts in One Browser… No logoff required.
A little back history on this subject, like a lot of people I have multiple Gmail accounts that I actively use, my personal, my work (K12) and my college account. Up until now I have had to log out of one to login to the other which becomes a pain. Up until this point I had no idea you could stay signed into multiple accounts. Not to mention its easy to setup.
AR Book Finder
Recently I have heard that teachers are having a hard time with students and parents asking “Is this an AR book?” and the teacher has to look through the lists and see if the book is on the list. Recently I have found out, “There’s and App for that!”. Check out the AR Book Finder and tell me what you think! (more…)
So, you got a Smartboard now what?
With the popularity of Smartboards in the classroom growing more and more teacheres are finding creative ways to utilize them in the classroom. Here are a few great resources for lessons as well as some training. Take a look!