Educator, Geek, Photographer, Motorcyclist, Lifelong Learner
I love long distance motorcycling. It gives me a chance to unwind after the school year finishes and to explore new sights.
Fully loaded, my bike, a 2011 Suzuki DL650 V-Strom, would often look like this: Continue reading “Third Wheel Trailers Motorcycle Trailer Review”
Students, the end of school is near! Before you leave, please do your best to fill in the course evaluation. I take your submissions very seriously, as your feedback gets used to make my courses better for future students.
As a convenience, I am also embedding the form here:
I’ve gathered up all the ETFO online AQs listed on the OTF PD Calendar that are being offered this summer. Please let me know if there are any omissions or mistakes.
I recently had the pleasure of being in the audience for a presentation from Carol Arcus, Vice-President, The Association for Media Literacy (AML).
AML has many amazing resources for teachers at both their website and their YouTube channel.
One of the highlights for me was their “EULA Project”, where they have taken many social media end-user licence agreements and converted them to plain English posters that can be displayed in your classroom for your students, all for free.
Here’s an example, posted in low-res only (see the link below for full-sized PDFs):
To see AML’s EULA Project in its entirety, visit http://www.aml.ca/i-agree/ where you can download PDF versions of each EULA poster.
(Also see http://www.aml.ca/agency-and-privacy/ for additional information about this project.)
Want to know what courses Brock is offering this summer for teachers? See the listing I’ve compiled here.
I recently had some discussions about updating a webpage to include popups for a number of organizations that were listed on a page. It got me thinking about how I could write a program that would efficiently generate the HTML instead of having to manually code it.
I’ve also been thinking lately about getting back into programming with Delphi, a language I used many years ago that is perfect for quickly creating little utilities.
Here’s the result:
It’s nothing fancy, but it will suit my needs should the task come up again.
If you’re interested in downloading the program for yourself, it can be downloaded from here. Because it’s written in Delphi, there’s no setup required and the program should run portably on most systems (Windows only). Â Just save it to the folder you’d like to run it from, like your desktop.
If you’re interested in the source code, shoot me an email and I’d be glad to  share it.
One of the things I like to do in class is to ask students to find supplemental resources on the web for the topic we are covering, especially tutorials.
To share what they find, I normally create a shared Google Doc where the they write a review of the resource. For each review, I ask them to concentrate on the following criteria:
These reviews have always been private, for good reason, since the document includes the students’ names.
This morning I received an email from a teacher requesting access to one of those documents. I can’t grant the teacher access to the document because of the privacy concerns, but I do want to be able to share the content. So what to do…
I’ve been using Diigo, a social-bookmarking site, for many years. Â It now has somewhere around 10,000 shared bookmarks in it, with bookmarks for many of my classes, including Communications Technology, Computer Studies, and Computer Technology, as well for general interest topics such as Cool Tech. Why not put the students’ website reviews on there as well?
So I started with the specific reviews that the teacher wanted access to: Flash. I simply visited each site the students had found to confirm it still exists, bookmarked it by using the Diigo Chrome extension, and added the relevant tags (like “Flash” and “tutorial”) along  with a new one: “Student Review”.
So now if someone wants to see resources my students have found, they can simply visit my Diigo account and enter “Student Review” in the search bar at the top. If they want to drill down further, they can click on the additional tag on the left to focus the search results to a certain class or topic.
I’m not going to immediately go back into all the previous reviews my students have created to update my Diigo account, but certainly going forward I’ll make it part of my protocol.
I hope this encourages other teachers to check out the resources I’ve bookmarked on Diigo (there are many!), but I also hope it encourages others to do something similar with the supplemental resources they find or use in class. I often say we’re all behind closed doors essentially doing similar things, so why not learn from each other by sharing?
Do you have a Diigo (or del.icio.us) account you’d like to share? Do you think this tip is useful? Any suggestions for making this process better? Any other comments?
Sprowt.ca is pleased to offer our Video Scholarship Contest, giving students in Niagara an opportunity to win some cash. Each year, PenFinancial Credit Union gives away $4,000 in scholarships to local students.
All students have to do is submit a video (under two minutes in length) outlining why they’re passionate about their chosen program of study. In other words, “what do you want to be when you grow up and why”? Details for the Sprowt Video Scholarship Contest can be found here!
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