SFX Tech Session #3

Here are the slides and notes for my session on "Haiku Deck" on November 12th:


Haiku Deck - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

• Haiku Deck is a web or tablet app for creating presentations
• Similar to powerpoint in some ways (and can export to powerpoint!)
• The philosophy behind the app is to make presentations...
• simple
• beautiful
• fun
• *intro video*
• Encourages effective presentations:
• Single idea per slide, arresting images, focus is on the presenter
• For education, useful as a teaching tool OR having students make their own for presentations
• Example decks: Space, letters, extreme environments
• Intro to creating - controls, new slide, help bubble, theme,
• Adding text, images, placement
• Try it yourself - ask me questions
• Specific way to set up one account for a class to use - I can provide more info if needed
• Can also embed a haiku deck onto your class blog if you want!

Help:

https://haikudeck.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

Tutorial:

http://blog.haikudeck.com/haiku-deck-tutorial/

Remembrance Day Resources

 

Veteran's Affairs Canada has posted several teacher resources online for the upcoming Remembrance Day. There are a few different activities posted, with something for everyone from K - 12.

"The peaceful society we enjoy has been created by the efforts and sacrifices of generations of Canadians who have put their lives on the line in the cause of peace and freedom around the world. Remembering all that they have done during times of war, military conflict and peace helps us to better understand our nation's history and its future.

These resources are provided to help ensure that the torch of Remembrance continues to burn brightly in the hearts of all Canadians."

 http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/information-for/educators

Open Office Tools

Open Office is a solid, free alternative is to other Office Suites. It has similar overall functionality, which makes it a good option for a 2nd or 3rd machine that does not have access to the same tools.

"Compatible with other major office suites, Apache OpenOffice is free to download, use, and distribute. Download it now, and get:

• Writer a word processor you can use for anything from writing a quick letter to producing an entire book.
• Calc a powerful spreadsheet with all the tools you need to calculate, analyze, and present your data in numerical reports or sizzling graphics.
• Impress the fastest, most powerful way to create effective multimedia presentations.
• Draw lets you produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.
• Base lets you manipulate databases seamlessly. Create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, all from within Apache OpenOffice.
• Math lets you create mathematical equations with a graphic user interface or by directly typing your formulas into the equation editor. "

For working on files across two programs different, use "save as" to save your work in the right file type, such as .doc or .ppt format for document and power point compatibility with Microsoft Office. This software is completely open source, and free to use however you want.

Tech Session #1

Here are the slides and notes for my session on "Staff laptops" on October 15th:


Staff Laptops - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Making the Most of your Staff laptop

1. Logging on and off speed
1. laptop is trying to sync your profile with the school server
2. if it’s taking forever, it may be trying to sync on a weak connection
3. for logging off, check your SFXSTAFF signal strength before you shut down
2. U: Drive - the Private Network drive
1. Can help down on log in and log off times.
2. Lots of space for big video/audio files
3. P: Drive - Public Network Drive
1. Can use it for sharing documents and files if necessary
2. Would advise against using it for simultaneous document work - use Google Docs for that instead
4. Using the scanner
1. Scan directly to the class folder in the P: Drive
2. Useful for scanning textbook pages, then using the projector to show them to the whole class.
3. A good way to back up material that you don’t have digitally (worksheet/quiz)
4. How-to pictures on slides
5. Printing
1. Which printer you can print to depends on what wireless network you are connected to.
1. sfxstaff1 - 5: allow you to use the printers on each floor
2. sfxschool: limited to only the lab printer + LAC for some computers (avoid using).
2. If you are having trouble printing from a laptop, double check which network you are connected to
3. If signal strength is low, see if there is an alternative sfxstaff connection that is stronger.

Aurasma - Customizable Augmented Reality

Aurasma is a free app that allows users to tag real-world objects or images with a video clip that plays when the object is viewed through the device. Since anything can be tagged, there are many ways to potentially use this in the classroom. Students could digitally augment their work, or teachers could add video to an image on a textbook or worksheet.

"See and interact with the world in a new way.

Thanks to Aurasma, every image, object and even place can have its own "Aura", which is our term for an augmented reality experience!  Through these Auras, magazines come to life with videos, adverts offer special deals through web click-throughs and quizzes, catalogues launch 3D product models, and much more.  Teachers also create Auras to add engaging digital information to printed materials in their classrooms. Simply use the free Aurasma mobile app to unlock Auras and share the experience with friends. Or get experimenting and use the simple tools within the app to create and share your own Auras."

 

Bibme - Citation Tools

Bibme is a website that is very useful for intermediate and high school students to build their reference or works cited list for an upcoming assignment. The site handles all the formatting for the user, and has a database of articles and books that is searchable by title, author, or ISBN number (for books).

"Welcome to Bibme

The fully automatic bibliography maker that auto-fills. It's the easiest way to build a works cited page. And it's free.

Search for anything
Search for a book, article, website, or film, or enter the information yourself.

Add it easily
Add it to your bibliography and continue citing to build your works cited list.

Download bibliography
Download your bibliography in either the MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian formats. It's that easy!"

My StoryMaker

A web app that allows students to create simple animated stories using a drag and drop interface:

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/embed.cfm

"You have the power to decide -- choosing characters, taking them on adventures and creating your very own story along the way. my StoryMaker® lets you control characters and objects -- and it creates sentences for you! Or, you can enter your own words. Once you are done with your story, you can print it out."

One thing I noticed when using this app: If you accidentally press the "end" button while creating your story, it is immediately "published" and then cannot be edited any further.

The app is able to generate a "magic code" which enables users to view or print their completed story at a later time.

Linking to Youtube with a specific Start and End time

Sometimes it can be useful to be able to link to a specific part of a Youtube video. Luckily, it is possible to send a video link with a specific start and end time.

Linking a specific start time is very simple, and is actually built into the "share" function on the Youtube video page. Below the any given video, click on the "share" tab, then look for the "start at" check box:

When you share this link, the video will start at the specified time for the viewer.



Specifying an end time is a little bit trickier, since we need to add the start and end time to the URL ourselves.

Adding the end time only seems to work if you are using the embed link (NOT the share link). Navigate to the "embed" tab and you'll see a long line of HTML code. For example:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Normally this line is for embedding the video into a webpage. Copy out the Youtube link from there (see example below).

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8

To add the start and end time, we need to add it to the end of our Youtube link. Both the start and the end at counted in seconds, so a start time of 10 means it will start 10 seconds into the video, and a start time of 120 will start 2 minutes into the video. The format for this looks like this:

?start=10&end=15

Adding the above line to the end of our video link tells the website to start the video at 10 seconds in, and end it 15 seconds in. The full link would look like this.

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8?start=10&end=15

MAPfrappe - Getting some Cartographic Perspective

An interesting website that is somewhat narrow in it's application, MAPfrappe lets users create outlines one one "map" and compare it to a second location around the world. The app automatically compensates for the slight size distortions at different latitudes which come out of how Google displays it's maps

MAPfrappe could be useful to share with a class studying Canada, or as a way to give students a direct sense of scale when discussing different countries around the world.

WordPress - Adding Newsletters to your Sidebar

I have written a short tutorial in Google Docs on how to create a new sidebar in WordPress to hold your newsletters or other uploaded documents.

Using Keepvid for the Classroom

Keepvid is a website and bookmark applet that lets you download videos from streaming video sites such as Youtube for offline use. This can be a lifesaver for teachers wanting to show video clips, while not being at the mercy of their internet connection which regular streaming necessitates. Personally, there have been more than a few times where I have tried to rely on streaming video, only to see that the video has been taken down, or that the internet connection is being unreliable again at the exact time I am trying to use it.

All you need to do is enter the link of the video you want to download, and then choose what quality you want the video to be. Higher quality will result in a larger file.

One thing to note when using this site is the often misleading download links. There are ads placed around the page that have big green "download now" buttons, but aren't what you should be clicking. The above image does a good job of pointing out where you should and shouldn't be looking.

Wonderopolis in the classroom

Wonderopolis is a website that posts daily "wonders" - questions submitted to the site and voted on by the community. These questions range from "Why does popcorn pop?" to "Where is the deepest place on earth?"

Welcome to Wonderopolis®, a place where natural curiosity and imagination lead to exploration and discovery in learners of all ages. Brought to life by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL), our Wonders of the Day® will help you find learning moments in everyday life—ones that fit in with dinner preparations, carpool responsibilities, a stolen moment between breakfast and the bus, or within school curriculum and education programs.

Wonder is for everyone. It can happen anywhere and at anytime. Connecting the learning we do in our schools, our homes, and our communities, Wonderopolis walks the line between formal and informal education. Each day, we pose an intriguing question and explore it in a variety of ways. Our approach both informs and encourages new questions, sparking new paths of wonder and discovery in family and classroom settings.

http://wonderopolis.org/about/

To answer each "wonder" there is often a short video clip, along with a brief article discussing the topic at hand. Wonderopolis has over 1200 "wonders" already answered, and it is growing all the time.

Gibson Research on Password Strength

In the past few days I have had some questions about passwords, and I came across a great article about relative password strength with an accompanying Interactive Brute Force Password “Search Space” Calculator. This tool lets you see how tough your password is to crack if someone attempted to gain access to your account completely blind.

The bottom line is both character variety and length are important when creating a password. All those websites that force users to use "one capital letter, one number, one symbol" are definitely on to something, because it makes your password that much more difficult to break into when doing so blind. Password length also has a much bigger impact than you may realize.

For example, using the calculator, we can see that an 8 character password using at least one of each character type would take about 18 hours to crack in an offline best case scenario, but if you add just one more letter, that becomes two and a half months, and with one more letter than that, it the time to break becomes roughly 19 years! The article talks about a technique called "padding", where you simply add a string of easy-to-remember characters to an already easy to remember password to create a secure password.


Trying out some passwords on this calculator and having this discussion in the classroom could be useful for upper intermediate students who may start (or have already started) creating their own online accounts sometime in the near future.

Haiku Deck for education

Here is something that I've shared with several teachers already - presentation software called Haiku deck. Created for with both iPad and desktops, it's a very easy to use app that has multiple uses in education as either an instructional tool for teachers or a platform for students to share their learning. It makes it very easy to make striking presentations without having to touch PowerPoint.

https://www.haikudeck.com/

Haiku deck recently featured 10 ways Haiku Deck can be used in education to get the ideas flowing.

https://www.haikudeck.com/10-ways-to-use-haiku-deck-in-education-education-presentation-qo8iVGkRKI

If you want to have students use Haiku Deck to make their own presentations, there are some clever ways to set up a classroom account that keeps everything in one place using the "+" feature of gmail email addresses. More here:

http://blog.haikudeck.com/haiku-deck-education-accounts/