Check out this nifty little feature. Magic Autofill lets you be lazy in Google Spreadsheet by doing the thinking for you. Sweet!
Editors Note: This is the first of a video series which may evolve into something more. Depending on the amount of encouragement ;)
The following is an announcement from The Foundation @ FCOE:
Announcement
The Foundation @ FCOE
2011 Innovation Grants
Beginning with the 2011-2012 school year, The Foundation @ FCOE will annually award grants of up to $1000 to Fresno County public school districts, to fund innovative projects or programs that promote student development and achievement. The Innovation Grant Application is available on the Foundation website at www.fcoefoundation.org/innovation/grant through September 9, 2011. Innovation Grant award recipients will be announced on September 15th and recognized at a reception on September 29th at 4:00 pm held at the Fresno County Office of Education. The Innovation Grants are sponsored exclusively by generous contributions from the employees of the Fresno County Office of Education.
Chris Durham presenting on free and open source tools at CUE 2011 in Palm Springs
Recently myself and Dave Childers went down to Palm Springs to present at the CUE annual conference. CUE stands for computer using educators. The presentation was on a mix of free and open source tools to reduce computing costs in a 1:1 school. We discussed a few tools we use daily at ACEL Fresno Charter High School. I’ll briefly discuss them here.
Schoology: “Schoology is a free web-based learning management system (LMS) built on a social network. Schoology leverages the familiarity of popular social media tools to improve communication and collaboration.” If Facebook and Moodle had a child you would end up with Schoology. Schoology has a lot of very cool features for teachers and students, far more than I will go into in this short post so I highly recommend you at least click on the link and check them out. Here’s a snippet.
We use Schoology to deliver content, files, links, and grades to students. This is a fantastic and feature rich tool for managing your 1:1 classroom.
Symbaloo: Symbaloo is a dashboard you can set as your homepage and spring to any site you have setup a tile for. We use it as a simple and cool looking launchpad for the students to access their commonly used pages but it has so much more potential. You can create webmixes and package lessons with all the online resources your students would need right on one page. You can also embed youtube videos and Google Documents right into your webmix, allowing the students to complete an entire lesson without ever having to leave Symbaloo. It is also a great way to share resources for staff development. It also has a lot of potential for personal use.
I have met the CEO of Symbaloo and he is a very cool guy. He is definitely open to new uses for their product. So tell him Chris Durham from CUE sent you.
Google Apps: If you haven’t heard about Google Apps by now then you should start to question your worth. Seriously though, if you can, you need to be using Google Apps in your classroom. There are countless sites out there which explain ways to incorporate Google Apps into your classroom, just Google it.
We use Google Apps for just about anything and everything. Every student and teacher has an account so we are able to easily communicate and collaborate. The live collaboration on documents and presentations is by far the most used feature. Students working on the same presentation at the same time is mighty powerful stuff.
iTalc: iTalc is a free tool which allows you to monitor and control student computers. Similar to Apple Remote Desktop.
“iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as
We run Linux on our student netbooks and iTalc works for both Linux and Windows.
Diigo: Cloud based bookmarking and so much more.
Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.
We use Diigo for staff professional development and each Teacher uses it individually in various capacities.
GIMP: This is a fantastic tool. It’s basically a free version of Adobe Photoshop which works on Linux, Windows and OSX. It is very powerful (although photoshop is better) and has a large user base which means there are lots of tutorials and videos on the internet to help you get going. The learning curve is not as bad as you would think. I use this program with 9th graders and in no time they are compositing images and placing themselves into historical photos. Check out GIMPKnowHow’s Youtube channel for some fun project ideas and tutorials.
Do you use any free or open source tools on a daily basis in your classroom?
Chris Durham for Mutual of Omaha's Aha Moment Ad Campaign Filmed in Fresno CA
I had seen the tv commercials and never really thought about how they found these people. For me at least, it was through the internet. In May of 2009 I received an email which said the Mutual of Omaha tour bus was coming to Fresno. They had heard about me through my site and my bio on my school’s website, www.acelfresno.org. They wanted to hear more about the transition from business to education and after a few emails back and forth, I was in a mobile studio, sharing my story. Check out the video below.
1-19-11 Update: The game has been put on hold, new projects have presented themselves and require my attention.
So first things first, no, I have never designed a game before. I have had this idea for some time now and I think I finally have the gameplan and tools to make it a reality. The game will be based on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which for those of you who don’t remember your history class, pretty much started World War 1. The game will play as a top down RPG and put you in the role of key figures in a group known as the Black Hand. With the story based on actual events, it should be a fun and interactive way for people to learn about a historical event that had dramatic and long lasting effects. I’m hoping to start programming over Thanksgiving break and have a working game by the end of Christmas vacation. If your interested in learning more about the assassination right now, check out the video at this site http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/assassination-of-archduke-franz-ferdinand-2