Posts Tagged ‘education’
Did you know 4.0
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009I saw these videos on Garr Reynolds’ web site. If you have liked the original “Did You Know” videos, you will definitely like these.
Easy Photography
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
My students are working on a PowerPoint file in class. I give them all the text. They come up with the pictures. All the pictures must be licensed with a Creative Commons license and several of the pictures must actually be taken by the student. The subjects of the photos are ordinary objects like pencils, pens and calculators.
My daughter was looking at this assignment and thought it might be fun to take all the pictures. Some time ago I spent $5 at Staples for a roll of white paper. We use this for our seamless background for pictures. Above you can see our setup. We took the pictures in the sun room to maximize the nature light available. I had to lie on the floor to take the pictures.
When we finished with the camera, all the pictures were dropped into Picasa for simple editing. I changed one picture to sepia and a couple to black and white. Other than that, we cropped them all to a 4:3 ratio because the camera shoots 3:2.
That’s about it. The PowerPoint file is below shared on SlideShare. If you would like to see the work of my students, search for the tag. I wrote it in chalk on the second slide.
Technology And Education
View more presentations from Alvin Trusty.
Protopage Upgrade
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Sometime yesterday Protopage had an upgrade. Here is what the site looked like before the upgrade.
Below is the same page after the upgrade. Notice how everything is shifted down about half an inch so that the options tab can be seen at the top.
The options tab is not new. Before this upgrade, the tab was at the bottom. That was nice considering that I use the options tab only a few times each year. I have posted a “downgrade” request on the Protopage blog. While I wait for a response, I’ll spend a little more time scrolling on my startpage.
Nemus Sync
Sunday, June 29th, 2008The iPod Touch has become my most valuable piece of technology. Last week I added this gem from Nemustech. Nemus Sync is a free utility that syncs Google Calendar with the Touch’s built-in calendar. Syncing works in both directions.
You have to jailbreak your Touch before you can add this utility. About a month after I bought my Touch I watched a couple of videos on YouTube and found easy to follow step-by-step instructions.
The average person can probably get by just fine with the built-in functionality of the Touch now that POP and IMAP email are included. Some of my jailbreak additions include Wikipedia and Mobile Twitter which I use on a daily basis.
If you do jailbreak your Touch, don’t do the automatic updates of the firmware. I turned those off a long time ago. I think it was the day I got the following message from Apple:
There is an upgrade for iTunes. It’s called Safari. Would you like to install it?
I had a flashback to 1996 when everyone was trying to get you to install “their” browser. I don’t understand how Apple can do something like this and it goes mostly unnoticed. If Microsoft were to try to push a browser out to an OS X machine that was upgrading a media player, it would be all over the tech news.
I’m not about to drink the Kool-Aid.