Hi I'm Kev and thanks for stopping by. Here you'll find the latest Tech, Tools, Toys, News and lesson plans for teachers who want to work smarter and keep a step ahead your students. I aim to keep it simple, straight to the point and relevant. Enjoy!
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Windows Live Movie maker is a fast, easy way to turn your photos and video clips into great-looking movies and slide shows for teaching.
The sights, sounds and action of a movie helps bring a subject to life. Create polished movies in about a minute using the AutoMovie feature. Windows Live Movie Maker has prompts to help you upload and share your movie on YouTube, or to burn a DVD for your class.
I get loads of teachers at work coming to me who have faults on their computer that means it needs reformatting, and personally I seem to regularly need to reformat my computer for whatever reason and that generally means backing up all of my work documents and valuables and then reinstalling applications.
If you are not all that tech savvy this can be quite a headache but I have three simple tips for you today to ensure you don't lose your work and save stacks of time reinstalling software. Hope this helps.
1: Partition your Hard Drive: This is a no brainer. You make 2 drives on your computer a C:\ Drive that has all of your operating system and software and applications on it and a D:\ that contains all of your documents, music, photos, etc. By doing this if your OS crashes all of your docs are safely stored on your D:\ Drive and you can confidently delete and reinstall windows without losing data. Any disk can be reformatted and here is some advice on how to do it below.
2: Install and use dropbox: Dropbox is the ultimate cloud based storage tool for ensuring you can save work to your local PC and it will be safely backed up to the cloud. Once again if your computer fails or gets stolen or something all of your docs can simply be downloaded to your PC exactly as they were. Dropbox is free for the basic package and you can find out about it here.
3: After reformatting head straight to ninite.com: I just came across this last week and it is a ripper. Ninite has about 100 applications that people generally install on their PC ie: firefox, Chrome, Skype, Flash, Acrobat, Winrar, Picasa etc and installs them in one hit in a fraction of the time. Swing by ninite and take a look now.
Sometimes things just go wrong with your computer and you might face a lengthy or expensive wait to get a supposed 'expert' to find the source of the problem. Fortunately there are a few sites on the web that will help you out of your problems whether it be a an annoying niggle or a complete meltdown.
Computerhope is a great starting point to actually find out what your problem is and then go most of the way to fixing it if your problem is simple. This is a Windows on only site covering all Microsoft O/S's from Windows 95 through to Windows 7.
Yes Apple Computers do break down too believe it or not and luckily Apple have a comprehensive help site available here to find a solution to your problem.
Many problems are simply annoyances rather than major issues then you need to visit annoyances.org to get fast answers to your problems via forums.
To actually watch someone fix common PC problems then you need to visit the eHowTech channel at Youtube. This also has a range of tweaking videos to improve performance.
Last but not least and in my opinion the best is just good old Google - just be specific about your problem when you type it in the search box and your solution is never far away. I have never found a computer problem yet that no one else has actually suffered and written something about.
Remember also that a computer problem is not a problem until you have rebooted and it still persists.
We are currently putting our 2011 computer images together for both out classroom and student leased netbooks and I am going through the process of adding and removing software and testing it before we deploy it to over 400 machines.
The big question is what do we put on them? There are hundreds of great pieces of software available to enhance students learning both paid and free as well as some must have links to great sites foreducation.
So I would love to hear what suggestions you have and I then will compile that list together and possibly uploading the finished computer image as a downloadable torrent for all to share. Please contribute below and tell us why you have suggested that piece of software.
I feel almost stupid writing this but it is just the stupid reality of using and relying upon IT to get us through the day. The hundreds of times teachers and students come to me and tell me about a problem with their computer that is fixed by a restart is amazing. In fact I am suggesting it is around 90 percent of the time. We have a motto here that an IT problem is not a problem until you have rebooted the computer. That's the best tech support advice I can give anyone alongside backing up your work regularly. RESTART Guys
We are constantly updating our standard windows image that we install on all 362 of our school computers to give our students and staff the latest and greatest flexibility and creative opportunities. At last count we had over 50 applications (most of them open source) but I always keep an eye out for new and useful apps. Today I came across this list of 40 apps that you can pick and choose from to suit the needs of your school. They cover all areas from browsers, office, media, file transfer, imaging, burning and backup, social networking, maintenance and utils and even games. Enjoy.
Microsoft doesn't really push the promotion of its products in the classroom considering they are the single biggest supplier of educational software in the world if you take into account their Office Suite, Operating System and Student Software so I thought it was worth taking a look at what they had on offer for teachers to support education on Windows.
Well the good news is that for the first time in a long time I found some resources from Microsoft that teachers may actually get some use out of. Teacher Tools off lesson plans, tutorials, How-to videos and community forums. It is not bogged down with promotional content and has a search filter to help you find what you are after.
Obviously this is not going to use to people who use a Mac but for the the other 95 percent of us I think this might be worth a look ( Just for the record before I get abusive emails I use both). Check it out here.
For those of you that missed my review of Microsoft's latest free video editing package I gave it a pretty good rap and highly recommend it. I still believe it to be the best 'basic' video editing package available not to mention it's totally free as part of the windows live suite.
It is a great option for editing anything you have filmed in the classroom on your flip camera or similar device and is definitely something you can ask your students and staff mates to have a shot at.
I came across this great video tutorial from PC Mech and would highly recommend sharing it with anyone who wants to learn the basics of WLMM. Check it out below and let me know how you go.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 4:19PM | 
