DV for Teachers

This morning I am acting as emcee for WolrdQuest, a social-studies quiz competition for high schoolers. Winner of the Atlanta competition hosted here at GSU wins tickets on AirTran to the national finals in April.

50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders | Online Universities.

An exhaustive list, nicely categorized, of blogs with valuable resources for policy makers, teachers, professors, grad students, educational technologists and anyone with a serious interest in where education is going.

Whether you want to be a teacher, principal or even an educational policy-maker, learning all you can about the field and how to be a more powerful leader while you’re still in college is essential. These blogs will fill you in on the latest news, provide inspiration, and ensure that you are up-to-date with the latest educational technologies so you can be the best education leader you can be.

RainyMood.com is a nice noise-generator for helping concentration. It helped me concentrate on this post!

I’m cheating twice here; bear with me. First cheat, I didn’t link to Part 1. It, and the point of this post, Part 2, have been floating in open tabs in my browser for too many weeks. It’s embarrassing, really. I should have posted these things a long time ago, but “I’ll do it later” is a constant refrain in my head and my life. (Ask my wife, or several of the people I work with.)

!

(On second thought, please don’t!)

The point, again, of this post: a series on Peachpit about Equipment for Video Podcasting, which covers an extensive amount of information, with pics and links, provides a very good one-stop reference about video podcasting (well, two, really, unless you think of the series as a single thing with separate parts).

And my second cheat? Those links point to the print-ready versions of the articles, because the originals are split into seven or eight shorter chunks requiring reloading the pages and that’s kind of cheating. At least I think it isn’t, so I’m counter-cheating.

Enjoy the articles.

I don’t think I’m an idiot, and I don’t think you’re one either. If you put anything from your school up on the web, though, you likely need to meet accessibility requirements, and here’s An Idiot’s Guide To Accessible Website Design from Web Design Ledger.

Wordle is great for making word clouds, which you can use in your classroom in many ways. Ellen sent me this

really useful little tip that opens up all sorts of new possibilities – a way of including phrases in word clouds. Look below and you will see what I am talking about. The phrase that Sylvie demonstrates is “Once upon a time”.

Read the details at Jamie K Eddie’s A really useful Wordle trick, and her neat-o followup tip here.

We knew this day was coming, and it’s about time. Teachers Using Cell Phones For Class Lessons, Homework.

The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

In Supporting your family, Macworld’s Chris Breen offers excellent tips for anyone seeking help with a computer. If you’re the tech support for family (and we’re about to surprise Mom with an iMac; she won’t see this because her existing ancient hand-me-down PC is unusably slow), or you’re just a user with problems of your own, the article offers excellent guides for first steps as well as how to deal with support techs. A terrific takeaway suggestion: take a photo of the problem as it occurs on-screen and print it out and take it with you. Worth a thousand words!

A quick post to this, so I can close the browser tab I’ve kept open for too long: Make Photoshop Faster: 2 little tips to help speed up the tool web designers love to hate. Thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball.