Trying to Teach with Technology

Using School Fusion with Haiku CMS

snplmcdo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:09:50 +0000

I just discovered Haiku and am playing around with it. If you only want to use it for one course it’s free for teachers. If you want to manage more than one it’s $4.95 a month. So far, I’m liking the simplicity and the setup. Hopefully, it will help me to be more organized with my Journalism classes. I’m going to combine Haiku with my SchoolFusion classroom site and see how things go. I do like School Fusion, but would like to use it a little more efficiently than I have in the past. Both of these resources could be stand alone web resources. I just like mixing things up. I am finding that, as a course management system, Haiku is quite a bit more user friendly than Moodle, but it is also much more limited in what it offers.

Loving Prezi

snplmcdo — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:42:28 +0000

I just recently discovered Prezi, an online, social, presentation tool. It’s really super easy to learn if you do the little tutorial and then fiddle around a bit. I have been pretty happy using PowerPoint in my classes up to this point, but Prezi is super cool and offers special free accounts for teachers and students.

The metaphor of the Prezi workspace, unlike PPT is more of an open desktop where you can bounce around from object to object. Prezis are not organized as slides. They more resemble my actual desk at work, where things are piled everywhere and I can pick things up to look at them and then set them down and pick up something else. I don’t have to go in a linear fashion, but I can if I so desire. I can also embed YouTube videos and other files in my Prezis.

Here is a very rough prezi I made for some notes on Economics content.

I need to explore the file feature beyond just pictures and see what things look like. I also need to explore the online meeting feature and the collaborative creation features. With the little I have explored so far, I’m imagining the possibilities.

Once you create a presention using Prezi it can be saved as a compact flash file if you like. Of course, you’ll have to get your tech department at school to make sure your net nanny will allow you to use it with students BEFORE you jump into Prezi at school. I ran into issues with permissions in two places, actually getting to Prezi, and then downloading the file, which was initially blocked altogether and then, after it was unblocked, worked on my PC but not my Mac at work.

Free Wiki Space for Educators

snplmcdo — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:06:37 +0000

Another discovery today. Here’s a site that offers free Wikis to educators for educational purposes. It also has some really neat content and suggestions for teachers.

Why PowerPoint is not always the best choice

snplmcdo — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:27:16 +0000

Here’s a great link to Abraham Lincoln’s Getysburg Address.

World History Podcast

snplmcdo — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:32:54 +0000

I found this neat podcast from webcast.berkely with a World History class in podcast format. Maybe this will be useful for our class.

Web Questing

snplmcdo — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:52:21 +0000

I’ve got my World History guys doing a webquest over WWI. So far, it’s going very well and I’m not having to be the activity police. They are all staying on task and working well together, thinking and discussing issues. They especially appreciate the break from our usual routine. We’ll see how things change once we move into phase II of this project.

My new favorite site

snplmcdo — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:09:21 +0000

Now that I have an iPod I’m discovering all sorts of things that I really love, which I never knew existed prior to the arrival of the Nano. One of those things is Podiobooks, audiobooks which are serialized as podcasts. My new favorite place on the net is Podiobooks.com. It’s a great place for finding FREE podiobooks. I’m all about the free stuff.

Eureka!

snplmcdo — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:45:01 +0000

I figured out the RSS. There’re WIDGETS, who knew? Now, I’m going to have to figure out how to use them. I love it when I can figure stuff out!

Links & category added

snplmcdo — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:49:43 +0000

Well, I played around with the links and categories. I still can’t figure out how to use RSS feeds, but probably with enough time and frustration I will be able to do it. I added the category Dog Training and then added links to the training journals for each of my dogs. I tried to link to these journals as RSS feeds, but I couldn’t seem to make it work.

What this is

snplmcdo — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:08:40 +0000

This is where I’m going to be testing out blogging features that I might want to use for real in the future.