As the school website manager, I find that I really don’t want to deal with opening up GIMP or Photoshop (my really old old old version of Photoshop on my old old old eMac running 10.2…cripes), I turn to something easier when I need to crop or resize an image.
Seashore is an excellent image editor for Macs. It starts up quickly, makes a new file from your clipboard if you’re pasting from Grab or a screenshot, and does generally a quick fixeroo.
My favorite thing right now, though, is the MakeJPEG droplet. This is the best idea anyone has ever had. Here’s how it works. Drop an image, MakeJPEG converts it into a .jpg file and puts it on your desktop. When you put the MakeJPEG icons in the dock (for 60, 80, or 100 percent quality), all you have to do is drop the image you want onto the icon and poof! The image is now a .jpg on your desktop. This is wonderful for those pesky TIFF files from Grab that I have to convert before using them in a blog post, for example.
Everyone is concerned about school safety. Who is in the building? Should they be there?
We are shopping around for a new school visitor management solution. Maybe it’s software or a kiosk, but we really want something that will not only maintain a database of people who enter and leave the building, but help us know if they should be allowed in our school at all. Part of the problem with this is manpower. At the very basis, signing in visitors at a school is almost pointless if you don’t have a school representative (a secretary, parent volunteer, teacher’s assistant…someone) verifying that the person signing in is actually who they are claiming to be. For example, on a paper sign in, Uncle Bob who is not supposed to pick up Johnny Joe, could sign in as Johnny Joe’s dad and pick him up. What’s the difference with an electronic sign-in? Nothing. It might even scan the visitor’s license, but that doesn’t mean that person is using their REAL license. It could be someone else’s they are using because they are a registered sex offender or otherwise need a way to hide their identity. Maybe this sounds too paranoid, but I really think we need to be more vigilant. We need a person to look at the license and at the person signing in and assure that the person has valid ID.
So, despite all these cool touch screen kiosks and sex offender checking options, driver’s license scanners, and photo snapping sign in doodads, the flaw is still there. Do we want to have to look back and find the photo of the person who signed in with a false name AFTER a child goes missing from a school? The only way to really assure we let the right people in the building is to have a human assisting visitor check-in. If your school is like mine, the office is always busy and our secretary is overwhelmed without assisting visitor sign-in. Perhaps we need to call on parent volunteers. We all have to work together to keep children safe, no matter how snazzy our sign in management is. To any parents reading this, see how you can help assist with visitor sign in by simply being present at the sign in counter and checking identification.
Here are some management systems we are looking at. If any readers have experience with any of these, or others, please let me know! This is a tough decision, to be sure, and an expensive one.
Veristream
I know Cindy and I had some discussions about this at Tech Camp this summer. So, you are a tech savvy teacher. Maybe you are a classroom teacher, tech coordinator, media specialist–but your groove when you are planning instruction involves technology in some capacity. You know that technology is not a replacement teacher. It’s not just a fancier version of a work book page. You use technology as a creative tool–your kids MAKE things with it. They collaborate with technology. You, as a teacher, collaborate with others using technology. To you, it’s nothing to whip up a Google doc, a wiki, or a blog post. You might have kids using these same tools. Podcasts and videos are not anything new to your students. If some or all of these apply, you could say you are sufficiently uninhibited and going where most teachers in your school have not gone before when it comes to getting tech going for your students and yourself.
But how do you get that teacher who still resists using an online gradebook to his/her standard old green paper book to use a wiki? Or make a podcast? Many teachers we work with still have trouble with email attachments and logging in to required programs. How do we get these teachers to feel inspired with the potential technology has for making things easier, more meaningful, and cooler?
I’ve come up with a couple ideas.
- Offer choices. Don’t throw a whole bunch of ideas at one time, but giving teachers choices (just like students) makes things seem easier. We are going to push having some sort of online presence for all classroom teachers this year. Last year, introducing blogs was pretty disastrous. Only 3 or 4 teachers out of 30+ actually got their blog to the post-”new blog” status, updating fairly regularly and using it as part of their classroom “stuff.” This year, we revisited the blog and also introduced the less intimidating idea of a classroom wiki. You know, it’s just like a web page only more than one person can have access to edit and post. Some wanted to use their old TeacherWeb pages (which they foot the bill for) and that is fine, too. I feel like more teachers jumped on board this time. Not all, but more.
- Teach the teachers first. Give teachers time to get used to new technology or new ways of doing things before pushing for those same ways or technologies to be applied in the classroom. For example, get teachers to collaborate on a wiki first. Once they feel comfortable with it, they can better see themselves using it in the classroom, or having their students making wikis.
- Encourage “one thing at a time.” Trying to do a blog, a wiki, podcasting, and iMovie, for example, is TOO MUCH. Encourage teachers to start small. Set a goal for one semester to get comfortable with blogging, for example. Then, have students respond to teacher blog posts. After that, move into having students creating blogs for projects. Maybe the next semester, move on to another tool, like wikis.
- Start a PLC. Get teachers together who you feel are already doing these things, or are comfortable with technology. Meet together or use a wiki to collaborate and start planning some really cool projects or ways to use technology in the classroom. Once you get some good stuff going, make it visible. Show it off. Let everyone else see the possibilities technology can bring to the table. This in itself might help get some more teachers interested in learning new things and using them in the classroom. We’re trying to get something like this together at our school.
- Share resources. If you find something good, share it. Maybe everyone knows about it already, but they probably don’t. Don’t be shy. Send a mass email to the faculty if you find something handy that someone might desire–open source software, a great website, an inspiring article. You never know who will get a sudden spark of inspiration. Sometimes all it takes is one thing to get you hooked and looking for more tech ideas.
That’s all I have thought of (and done so far). If you have any more ideas, please share.
I’ve recently discovered this and wondered how in the world I have missed it. Journler has to be the coolest thing ever. I don’t know if I have ever mentioned it before in this blog, but I am an aspiring author, hoping to get some YA books published one day. How I have ever functioned working on my novel projects without this application is hard to even understand now, and I’ve only been using it for two days.
On the Journler website, they describe the program as:
Elegant, beautiful, powerful. Journler is a place for your thoughts and everything they touch.
Featuring iLife integration, audio and video entries, extensive document importing and instantaneous searching and filtering, not to mention Mail, iWeb and Address Book integration, a dash of blogging and AppleScript and Spotlight support.
Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. Scholars, teachers, students, professors, scientists, thinkers, the business minded and writers of every persuasion use it on a daily basis to connect the written word with the media most important to them.
Holy cow. One of the best features of Journler in my opinion is the Smart Folders. Create, color code, and set up folders that search for tags, content, titles, categories, etc. and any pages you write get automatically saved to the right folder or subfolder. So for instance, I can have pages instantly sorted to chapter folders, notes folders, character histories, etc. I will never have to sort through my documents folder again.
For teachers, this could be an extremely handy application. Sort reflections, lesson plans, pictures, videos. Create a journal of your school year. Have it all in one easily organized spread. Likewise, Journler could make a great family journal/digital photo album/video collection. It’s kind of like a word processor, a blog, iLife, and a wiki all rolled into one. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. I haven’t finished exploring all the features.
First of all, I would like to say how amazed I am at the revamp of Discovery Education. If you are in Memphis City Schools, you have access to this wealth of resources. I suppose I should do a more in depth blog post about this, but right now that would take a lot of time and I have none of that. Here I sit at work on Saturday night after 6 PM. School starts on Monday. I am waiting for some video to get converted so I stopped to share the solution to a problem I just discovered I had.
I was thrilled with the idea that teachers can download the videos that are marked “edit” at DiscoveryEducation.com and cut and fiddle with them as we like. The possibilities for fun and meaningful projects with the kids are endless. My idea, however, was to incorporate a few of these editable segments into a video I am making about our lab computers, and lab rules and procedures as an introduction the first week of school. I discovered after a bit of frustration, and checking on DiscoveryEd’s help pages, that you cannot drop their .mov video segments into iMovie and get to fiddling unless you have QuickTime Pro. Now, this is pretty cheap as far as software goes, but I am not dropping $29.99 right now after my trip to FedEx Kinkos earlier this week which broke the bank. So, I found what seems to be a good work around.
Download open source HyperEngine-AV. In fact, you could stop there. The DiscoveryEd video segments dropped nicely into there and it is enticingly easier than iMovie. Very clean, simple, and to the point. This would seem a lot less daunting to techn0-phobic teachers, as well as providing a more simplistic means to allowing kids to do narration over the video. I’m taking it a step further. I want to use iMovie, gosh darn it. So guess what? The DV file drops nicely into iMovie.
If you want to convert the DV file to another format, use a free converter like Handbrake.
Do you have a better way to do this? Let me know. For now this seems to work. And I might go home at a decent time tonight. Wait…it’s WAY too late for that. I’m at school on a Saturday…
