Apps top 10

Top 10 Apps tips

1. App creation has a really low barrier to entry, which means that no matter what you're thinking about, there's an app for that.
2. Some of them are even really good.
3. Apps have a tradition of being very inexpensive, or even free, which is ideal for a teacher's budget.
4. Many students have access to smart phones, and the number is increasing rapidly.  You might be able to make use of great technology without spending a ton of money on hardware.
5. There's a good chance that students are already familiar with the interface, and if the app is really great, it might become something they will use all the time.
6. They're going to use their phones no matter what you do.  You might as well encourage them to learn something too.
7. There are a huge number of apps, and new ones being created all the time.  If you don't want to make a full time job out of evaluating new apps, you need a good strategy for filtering.
8. The best advice I heard for that was to follow a particular blog.  But because I wrote it down, instead of putting it in my blog, I don't know how to get to that blog.  Doh!
9. Apps can enable students with disabilities to do things they might not be able to use otherwise.
10. Graphing is intensely important in building understanding of mathematical principals, but graphing without technology is slow and annoying.  Technology makes graphing so immediate that you can understand ideas in whole new ways.  It's possible to build intuitions that used to take many weeks of work in only a few minutes.  Woo Hoo!

webquest top 10

top ten webquest tips

1. The time you put in up front will pay dividends on the back end.
2. It's important to create a task that students can complete without further instruction.
3. You definitely want students to stay interested throughout the exercise.
4. It's good to have tasks that exercise different levels of thinking.
5. All of the above are reasons why much time and energy must be invested.
6. Since websites and web pages aren't permanent, you also need to check out your links before you reuse a webquest.
7. Once you're done, though, you have an activity that can be used any time you need it, because
8. some students didn't get permission slips signed to go on your field trip, or
9. you need a substitute on short notice, and can't be sure the sub can handle anything intricate, or
10. some students want to work independently on a project while the rest of the class is doing something else, or
11. you can't stand the idea of trying to teach something the last day before Christmas, but you also don't want to be that teacher that shows videos of the latest James Bond movie.

Blog tips

Top 10 blogging tips

I've been blogging since August, so obviously I'm a tremendous expert.

1. Always include a link to the originator of your knowledge.  It's the whole point of a blog.
2. Exercise editorial discretion.  If there's anyone following you, it will be because your viewpoint helps them to find things they want to read.  If your inner editor says cute pictures of kittens, then that's what you need to link to.  If not, then you should probably avoid them like a simile for something to avoid.
3. Stephen Strogatz needs to post more often.
4. Nate Silver still posts interesting information about statistics, but his graphs haven't been updated in a month.  Get on that, Nate!
5. Blogs are available anywhere.  If I find something important, I can put it here and never have to search for it again.
6. Blogs can be accessed at the user's pace.  They can give you the tip-of-the-iceberg introduction to a subject and point the way to more.  An interested reader can pick an choose what interests them.
7. The interactive qualities of blogs aren't up to the standards of one-on-one face-to-face teaching, but they stand up well in comparison to what happens in a lot of overcrowded classrooms.
8. Blogs can allow students to self-publish at extremely low cost, and with a great deal of control over the way their ideas are presented.
9. As a centerpiece of a class project, a blog could provide a great way to distribute, collaborate, and collate the work.
10. There's nothing magical about the number 10.

Video top 10

Top 10 video tips

1. Khan Academy has already done it.  Are you sure you can do anything to make it better?
2. Ok, you've found the one topic that Khan hasn't done yet.  Remember, you should write a script and go over it a couple of times.  Not everyone can ad-lib well.
3. NOOOOO!  That was too many rehearsals.  Now you look bored with what you're saying.
4. Make sure that you're set up without something embarassing in the background.
5. Make sure that the camera angle doesn't turn an innocent gesture into something unfortunate.
6. NOOOOO!  Now you're thinking about being taped.  You're no longer living in the moment.
7. Moving your frame of reference can give your film the feeling of motion, even when nothing interesting is happening.
8. You don't have a professional cameraman, so you're out of focus now.
9. You have a camera with really good software, so you're in focus.  Unfortunately, it's not a steadi-cam, so your audience is getting seasick.
10. No wonder Charlie Rose just sits at a table with a black background.

Ok, here is something that I am happy to know now.

• Adobe Premiere is incredibly powerful, and moderately confusing.  But with a few minutes watching videos, you can get to the point where you are actually doing something.  Anything that you can figure out how to do will be done with the greatest of ease.
• Westminster College only:  although the people in Bassis believe that Adobe Premiere is available on the computers in the portfolio lab, I see no evidence of this.  If you want to use Premiere, you should go to the photo lab.  (It looks like it's a restricted area, but they never kicked me out.)
• Every video editing software has some file formats that it recognizes and some that it doesn't.  This is especially annoying when you deal with Windows MovieMaker, which produces .wmv files, which nobody else can understand, and with Apple's IMovie.  Apple pretends that there is no such thing as a file format, because it doesn't want to confuse its users.  But it also refuses to widen the set of files that it recognizes, to be helpful to those easily confused users.  Their model is to segregate their users, and prevent them from being able to operate in a universe that contains anything other than Apple.  It works pretty well from their marketing perspective.
• Youtube,  on the other hand, will recognize any kind of movie file format known to man.  They have a business model that encourages everybody to upload their videos, even if that person uses a minority file format.  Youtube also allows the person who uploads a video to download that video, in the process translating it into Mp4 format, which Premiere can comprehend.
• Adobe Photoshop is incredibly powerful, and extremely confusing.  I don't know of a good procedure for learning to do anything with the program, despite hours watching artists working miracles with this program.

And here's the link to our interviews of West High School teachers.

Powerpoint top 10

ten tips for powerpoint

1. You can control when students read information, to prevent anyone from working ahead.
2. You can present the same lesson over and over without ever thinking.
3. You turn the lights off, so students can catch up on their sleep.
4. By reading the slides, you can prove to the students that you know how to read.
5. If you record a voiceover, you should definitely remember to periodically shout "Hey, wake up back there."  The students will think you're magic.
6. Consider scanning in the textbook, and showing one page per slide.
7. Just because powerpoint can display graphics doesn't mean you have to use graphics that mean something.  Try showing a slide of your kitten.
8. If you print out the slide show, and then show the slide show, while reading along with the slide show, that means you have three times as much concern for your students' engagement as the average teacher.
9. Nothing says "I'm creative" like using a yellow font on a yellow background.
10. You can put a musical soundtrack on the slideshow.  Consider using the theme song to donkey kong.  The students will think you're retro.

A word about PowerPoint. PowerPoint was released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets. After PETA successfully argued in court that PowerPoint actually was more cruel than iron mallets, the program was adopted by corporations for slide show presentations.

Video editing experiment

http://youtu.be/UPaKDuKfv8I

I don't recommend you view this if you have sophisticated tastes.  Purely for the puerile.