ICT Tips for Teachers

Sent an email in haste?

2010-11-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

Did you know you can recall an email message? As long as the person you have sent it too has not already read it, you can! Please note, they will get an email saying that you have recalled an email, so you may need to send another email explaining why you recalled the original email! See below on how to do it:

Increase the size of the scroll bar in windows 7

2010-11-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

Using an interactive white board with the standard 17pt scroll bar is a challenge - why not increase it to 30pt with a few clicks - watch the video on how to do it below:

Free, Free, Free, Free

2005-10-30T07:03:00.000-08:00

All this stuff is free and I use on a regular (if not daily) basis:

Anti-virus:
AVG from Grisoft. Updates are free, they sell a commercial anti-virus program, but the free version works just fine. Go to free.grisoft.com and scroll down to "download AVG Anti-virus Free edition now." (tip: don't run two different anti-virus programs at the same time - likely to crash or work incredibly slow - schedule your full scans at lunchtime when you are not likely to using your computer)

Firewall:
Zone Alarm from zonelabs.com

Spyware:
1) SpyBot Search & Destroy
2) Ad-Aware
3) Microsoft AntiSpyware
(tip: don't run them at the same time - your computer will run incredibly slow, each will find things that the others wont)

Web browsers:
1) Firefox at www.mozilla.org/products/firefox
2) Opera at http://www.opera.com/download/
3) Slimbrowser at http://www.flashpeak.com/sbrowser/dlpage.php
4) Netscape at http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/
(In my opinion opera is the fastest, slimbrowser the easiest to use, but IE has more plug-ins and 'all' sites are written primarily for IE, some browsers struggle with frames and java etc, tip: add all these browsers to your list of browsers in frontpage or dreamweaver (or whatever you use) and make sure you check all pages you write work in them)

Microsoft Office clones:
Open Office www.openoffice.org

Remote storage:
You can get 10 gigabytes of remote storage free at www.streamload.com

Windows alternative:
Linux (I am not brave enough to try just yet!), but it can be used on a machine that isn't powerful enough for Windows XP (many of us have an old laptop around that could become a little more useful than gathering dust. Linux isn't for everyone. You'll actually have to learn a bit to use it. For those with a spirit of adventure, go to http://www.linux.org/dist/download_info.html

Other free stuff:
Try to regularly go to http://www.download.com/ or http://www.tucows.com/ and have a look at the top ten downloads or subscribe to their emails to save you going to their sites.

A quick fix

2005-10-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

You don't have to retype anything in Microsoft Word if you got the case wrong. You can highlight the problem words or sentences, click Format, Change Case and choose what you want. Much faster, and hands on the keyboard, though, is this way: Hold the Shift key and hit F3 until you get the desired result. It's a toggle that gives you upper, lower and title case as you tap F3 repeatedly.

Reduce the file size of your powerpoints

2005-10-25T01:52:00.000-07:00

If you are into powerpoints then here's a quick tip. If you use a lot of images on your slides then to reduce the file size make sure you use the insert>picture>from file method rather than cut>copy>paste. The later is easier I know, but you wil find the resulting file size after you save your work much larger. Try it and see!

More powerpoint tips can be found on these links, including embedding flash into your slides (don't pay for any software - just learn how to do it using the active-x controls) and altering the master template (definitely worth a read)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011168821033.aspx (reduce file size)

http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Embedding-Flash-into-Powerpoint/3051 (embed flash) scroll down a little to get to it, or see the help section in powerpoint

cya

Sad spreadsheets

2005-10-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

I am not a microsft fan, but there is one spoke of the office wheel which I have yet to find an equal. When you start to really explore the power of Excel you will understand what I mean. Ok, for simple mark books and averages of tests etc there are plenty of alternatives, but yesterday I came across something called pivot tables. If you have, like us, large spreadsheets with many users them it is sometimes difficult to quickly (and perhaps more importantly, easily) compare classes, sets, teachers, gender, tutor groups etc etc with each other. Ok, formulas can do all the work for you, but they require constant monitoring to make sure they are referencing the correct cells. Pivot tables take care of all of that and, although they sound scary, are in fact quite simple. To cut it short - your time will be saved if you invest half an hour reading about pivot tables in the help section of excel - guaranteed! One more thing, just make sure your there are no blank cells in the titles of your columns - otherwise the pivot table will not work - to overcome this you could write something in the cell with the same colour font as the cell background and then it would not be seen. Happy pivoting.

Homework ugh!

2005-10-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

To try and make homework a little more challenging and hopefully interesting I have been using blogs to publish my homeworks for all age groups. This allow the following kinds of activities:

addition of hyperlinks to specific websites which avoids aimless searching

interactive homework in which the pupils tries out quizzes

adding comments by the students to a question I have asked

pupils helping each other in searches

It is also straight forward to have images on these blogs which circumvents the need to photocopy colour images or indeed any photocopying. If you are lucky enough to have a homework database for the students then you maybe able to provide a hyperlink to your homework blog from the students homework page. Patana School has such a database (which we all use!) and will accept html tags to create hyperlinks.

If you have your own website it will probably have content that is more or less stable and requires only occasional updating. However if you wish to have information updates on a more regular basis but wish to avoid ftp and updating files on servers. This is where the blog comes into its own. On my own site I have hyperlinks to reading lists, homework and 'links of the week'. These can be updated from anywhere that has an Internet connection. Have a look my site and then the Patana Science site which may give your ideas for your own blog.

Of course you can always have your own dedicated web site that can do all these things but the point of blogging is that it is fast, non technical and FREE!

Think you need help getting started then check out Blogger.com or come along to our session at TechEx

And another thing

2005-09-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about blogs is it affords the opportunity to get things of your chest. Each of us has sat through endless staff meetings and INSET feeling that we have something to contribute yet deciding ( for one reason or another) to observe and 'intelligent silence'. Before you rush off to make your next post a word of caution. A blog post is even more in the public view than an email. Most of us already know that when the heckles are raised its always better to save our email as a draft and re-read the next morning before sending. So, trying to take my own advice here goes....

With the publication of the LSC report on learning styles the cotton wool can fall from the eyes of the believers and the grumbling back row cynics can feel vindicated. Read the reports they are nothing short of damning of the kind of 'learning theory' that dominate teachers INSET courses.

The reports clearly show that individualistic (differentiation), team teaching and triarchial theories have no supporting evidence to justify their inclusion in teaching strategies. Elsewhere we can find evidence of our misplaced faith in 'left brain, right brain theories'.

What is pointed out (by the report) is that the discussion and debate that arises from such INSET is in itself the most valuable outcome. Establishing a dialogue for teachers to exchange their professional experiences. Rather than any one of these theories having any effect it is in fact the enthusiasm of the teacher that is influencing the students improved performance and attainment. It is worth stating again that there is no or insufficient evidence to support any of these 'learning strategies' being elevated to the status of a theory let alone a hypothesis.

The report also considers briefly why teachers (an intelligent bunch) have so whole heartedly embraced such models without any evidence to support them. It is sufficient to say that the reasoning will give senior colleagues some soul searching and if not that then some serious consideration about the allocation of training budgets in the future. Schools really need to take a close look at their teaching and leaning policies and be courageous enough to respond to theses reports.

Personally I admit to be being one of the back row grumblers at such inset, muttering my personal incredulity at the theorists. However rather than basking in the reflected glory of these reports, I would like to see a common sense (not so common perhaps) approach to teaching and learning. Schools need to value and listen to the more experienced teachers and channel the boundless energy (damn them) of young teachers in productive ways.

Fingers crossed perhaps we will now hear colleagues at future conferences have the confidence to shout out ' The emperor has no clothes, your theory has no substances'.

How do you manage your favourites or bookmarks?

2005-09-21T03:09:00.000-07:00

If you are like me in that when finding a web site you like you insinctively drag it into your favourites (bookmarks) then by now I imagine you've a very long list and spend ages trying to find that elusive one. Ok, you can create a folder by category and dump it into there, but there are some that are a bit difficult to catergersise, take this one for example (see the screen shot). Seriously though, if you move from one computer to another then it's a pain keeping track of them because your favourites are stored in your profile (different from one computer to the next). A good tip is to use your thumb drive to carry your favourites on and when you use any computer they are always there for you. You could name the folders by date rather than subject. I suppose it is a personal thing, but I seem to remember them better that way. Even better than this you could carry the whole browser on the thumb drive, favourites included. There is a portable version of the ever increasingly popular 'firefox' that easily fits on your thumb drive. This neat little version can be downloaded (for free) from www.majorgeeks.com/download4424.html). Great too if you regularly use internet cafes and don't want to expose yourself to the security flaws within ms iexplorer. Happy plug n surf.

Spice things up for free!

2005-09-20T18:08:00.000-07:00

So many worlds
So much to do
I guess I should learn JavaScript too!

Well actually to achieve some very nice effects on your webpage or blog and all you need are ‘cut & paste ‘skills and a little html. Follow this link to our science faculty webpage and you’ll see some great JavaScript effects. There’s the menu written using Tigra menu builder, colour sliders and a very useful Google search engine. The latter is a great feature that can be customised to either search your site or the WWW.

But let’s start somewhere a little simpler and there’s no place better than Hypergurl. Not only does this site provide free JavaScript to copy and paste it even has tutorials on how to…well cut & paste. Still not sure about those html tags, then try this site for an introduction and then there is more html tag stuff. To start with you only need to be able to tell the difference between the head tags and body tags. Another favourite place for script is Simplethebest

The Hypergurl site and Simplethebest provides demonstrations of each effect and advice on editing and the placement of the JavaScript. I’m sure there are some real benefits to learning JavaScript but quite frankly I’d rather be on the beach with a complete copy of the works of Tennyson.

Round hole square peg

2005-09-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

A lot of our video resources have been copied from vcr cassette onto VCD's. We then copy them onto the hard drive of computers around the department and link to them through an excel spreadsheet (rather than carry the VCD around, loose it damage it etc). I will write about how to do this in another post. What I wanted to talk about today was how to very quickly convert the VCD file into an mpeg for your media player to quickly recognise. The files on a VCD are *.dat files and are not normally recognised by your media player (you have to set the 'open with' setting from the file menu - this is a pain if you use multiple pc's because the settings are kept in your profile). The easiest thing to do is convert the *.dat file to an *.mpeg. First, it is a good idea to allow the file extensions of all files to be viewed in your explorer window. Follow these steps in your explorer window: click 'tools', 'folder options', 'view' tab, uncheck 'hide extensions to known file types', 'apply', 'ok'. Now you should see the file extensions of all files on your computer when you browse your files. Getting back to the conversion. Find the *.dat files on your VCD (usually in the MPEGAV folder) and copy them to where you want to store it. Right click, 'rename' and delete the .dat extension and type in .mpg (or .mpeg). Windows does not like you changing the extension and a warning pops up, just ignore it (hence the title above). You are not really converting, just pointing the file to your media player, but it is certainly faster than waiting for a conversion program to crunch though each frame. You will see the icon for the file change to the mpeg icon and when viewing the files in thumbnails mode the first frame can be seen. If you want to chop up mpeg's, add titles etc you can use the mammoth adobe premier or easier still download the free (nice price) windows movie maker from the windows website - simple to follow instructions, but some of the quality of the original mpeg is lost later on. Happy watching.

Bangkok Traffic

2005-09-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

If I don't get away before 3pm my journey home time is doubled. Meetings and other things I don't want to do mean that it's sadly not always possible. Today was a 2.45pm race to the car to avoid swimming down my soi (it has not stopped raining all day) that easily floods on days like this. With the inevitable traffic on Sukhumvit I always have something to read to pass the time. I picked up the user guide that comes with our new interactive 'smart' boards for such a snarl (sad man). There were some great tips on how to use the board and the software that comes with it and a couple of sites from which you can download free stuff (always our favourite price). Amongst all the boring blurb in the manual was a recommended website (www.smarttech.com). On this site there is loads of material submitted by teachers from all over the world. The files work with the 'smart' board software (click here to get the software - use a fast connection, it takes bloody ages) but you don't necessarily need the board to make good use of them, just a projector. In the one shown in the image here students drag the bones to the correct places. Another involved dissecting a cow's eye! Happy surfing!

Bangkok Post Database

2005-09-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

Its Wednesday!! Shower that little bit earlier, dress a little bit faster, catch the taxi earlier for 'today's the day the....' Well actually there's no teddy bears picnic but there is the Bangkok Post Database section. You see my colleagues are less than scrupulous and a late arrival at work will see this crucial weekly section disappear for ever.

This is a top publication and should be compulsory reading for any teacher remotely interested in ICT. The link above takes you to the website but you really need to get the paper which contains some great little gems.

I should have thought about this before

2005-09-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

More and more with practical write-ups I simply take a photo of the apparatus, print it out for the kids and get them to stick in and label. Ok, so drawing scientific apparatus (and diagrams) is an important skill, but it is the ability to identify that is most often required. Valuable lesson time can be used drawing the apparatus or diagram. I used to import the *.jpg into msword, crop, resize, copy to make a line of photos, group and then fill the whole page to make a sheet to print off and cut up. Today however I was printing a couple of photos for a display when I noticed the wallet sized (or contact sheet) function in ms picture manager (a free program that comes with office). So, simply right click on your *.jpeg (or whatever image file you use), select 'open with' ms picture manager, select 'file', 'print', (check your printer is installed), click 'next', scroll down to select the 'wallet print', choose how many you want per page (9 is a good size) and print. Much faster than farting around in word. Another tip (with the younger ones) - get a student in the background of the apparatus and ask them to label him/her 'mad scientist' or whatever they like - they love it. Just got to get a fancy printer that cuts the damn photos out now! Later on when you teach the topic again to another class, rather than show them how to set-up the apparatus, save even more time and develop different skills by simply showing the *.jpg and asking to set it up. If you build up a file of the images they are useful when ordering equipment from the lab technicians, training new lab technicians or simply to jog your memory when ordering your consumables at the end of the year.......blah blah blah

Why harm the kids?

2005-09-10T01:44:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that I didn’t finish the Bangkok Post 'Pupils stabbed at school' Saturday 10th September without shedding a tear. The lead story details the events of Friday the 9th in which 4 children of St Joseph's Convent School Silom Bangkok where attacked by a woman'. The Bangkok Post report that 3 of the children are seriously injured.

It’s not the first time a school has been the focus of such violence and sadly it will probably not be the last. I remember the breaking news on March 13, 1996 when Thomas Hamilton walked into a school in my native Scotland and slay 16 children and one teacher. Then again on April 20th 1999 two young men walked into a school in Littleton, Colorado and killed 13 people and wounded 25 others seriously.

Events like this test our patience and understanding to the limit. Most people consider children to be amongst the most vunerable in our society and treasure their safety. When an attack like that of Friday occurs we feel that we have struck at the heart of our community.Yet, sadly children are attacked all the time both in the home and in our communities. The significance of the Friday attack is that it occurred in a school. School is supposed to be a special place, a haven from the pressures and dangers of the outside world. A place where children can be free to express and develop themselves under the watchful eye of their teachers.

Our sympathies go out to the parents, teachers and pupils of St Joseph's. Our best wishes for a speedy recovery go to the four children. Come Monday morning we will all be looking to our security arrangements!

Has technology gone too far?

2005-09-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I know you're busy, but just take 2 minutes to follow this link from the planet science newsletter I receive each week (honestly, they are not bad most of the time).
Read it? Ok, here's what I think. What's wrong with simply talking to students? Building up a relationship with them so they feel comfortable to ask you a question or dare to get one wrong? Just imagine.......................

walk into your bottom set yr 11 last double on a Friday....................
5 mins to log off the teacher that forgot to log off before and save their work 'cause they 'ctr & alt & del' locked it thinking it's in their own personal computer (or lab)......................
5 mins to log on using your own username and another 5 to find the power point with the questions for the kids 'cause the web site is too bloody slow.....................
in the meantime some of the class have started to fall asleep (far too much fish 'n chips at lunch) and the rest are planning the weekends 'activities'...................
give out the handsets, not enough for one each 'cause they've been double booked for Maths so a fight breaks out between two of the lads as to who can 'zap'.....................
in two of the 'zappers' the batteries have run out...................
one 'zapper' has the send button missing.....................
now the send button on one of the 'zappers' interacts with the remote on your fancy projector and causes the slides to advance automatically (some of the projector remotes have a mouse built-in).........................
you fail to realise that it does not take that long to go through the 40 questions you prepared and have to blag your way through the rest of the lesson.............. etc etc

Do some parts sound familiar? I am a strong advocate for technology and ICT (hence this blog!), but sometimes they just do not mesh together nicely - is this is a classic example?. I would love to be proved wrong though - send me your 'zappers' please!!!!! Besides, did you have a look at the powerpoint that was on the site, did one of her year 7's write it? Enough ramblings, got some kids to go and talk to.............

Blogging

2005-08-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

Weblog tracker Technorati.com issued its State of the Blogsphere Report saying the number of blogs jumped from 7.5 million to 14.2 million in five months -meaning since March a new blog was created every second. Tick. Tick. Tick. Three more blogs.

A blog for the beginner is :

easy to make and only requires simple word processing skills.

simple as you do not need a web editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

a single webpage but there is nothing to stop you having multiple blogs and linking them together.

built using templates in just minutes.

you can add pictures and hyperlinks very easily.

a professional finish.

an interactive page allowing your students or colleagues to add comments.

edited from any internet connection.

totally free.

For the Intermediate / advanced user they can be:

edited using html, adding most tags and css.

enriched by adding javasript and other dynamic effects.

In this session everyone will be able to set up their first blog and explore applications through demonstrations and discussion. We invite advanced users to attend and share their experience.

We have set up a support group called International Teacher that will support TechEX delegates after the event has finished. We look forward to seeing you on the day and sharing good practice.