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You can do a reverse flip with any web cam. You don’t have to be fancy. Since you are using your teaching voice in the classroom, you don’t need a loud microphone but it wouldn’t hurt – I have used one.

Right now, I use a Logitech Web Cam. With it, I can even Picture in Picture. I teach computer science so most of my lessons are stuff that are done of the computer. I even do my own closed captioning a lot of the time, talking what I am typing.

Camtasia has a Screen Recorder that you can use to record your screen. There is a company called Swivl that makes a device that makes your camera follow you, I have two, don’t use them enough and they are great. http://www.swivl.com/

If they aren’t here at #TCEA2013 they should be.

Don’t need much else.

I HATE the concept of flipping. Reverse flipping fills in the gaps, rather than trying to enhance what the teacher does in the classroom.

I don’t have time to record my lectures ahead of time, I teach 5 preps, and I’ll probably change my mind 3 times before I see the kids. My kids don’t have time to watch them, my best student is on my robot team and on the basketball team.

However, I’ve been using the same software the flippers do to produce my lectures to let kids either repeat what I’ve said or to let kids see what I’ve done when they have been out.

I started it because I had a deaf student in my web design class. I recorded it because I thought he needed it but he did fine with my own closed caption. However, my non-English speakers LOVED it. They would play my demonstrations at their own speed, slowing me down, stopping me, for fast forwarding me as they work on the assignment.

I do believe that you get what you pay for and I have been using Camtasia for YEARS…. Probably decades. I rarely bother to edit afterwards, but will pause or chop it up as I go. By using Camtasia, I can usually upload in less than 5 button clips. I upload while I am monitoring students and while grading student work.

I did a four hour session on RobotC programming for Lego today and I think it was successful. A librarian was about to program a robot for the first time to do an obstacle course.

Another teacher thought they had learned how to teach programming.

No one walked out.

Had lots of questions.

Lots of people asked to log into my Moodle.

Only thing I forgot to do was to plug in my laptop.

I get to play again on Thursday!

Good turnout.

Yes, I teach high school. Many of my students are taller than I am, okay at 5′ 4″, most.

Some have children of their own and occasionally, some have been married.

Yet, I still think of them and call them my babies.

First, it reminds me that they are not making mature decisions yet. It keeps me from holding grudges and remembering that whatever happens, they are still capable of learning.

Second, it reminds me that my job is to help them learn and grow from their mistakes.

One of my babies doesn’t get it. I’ve written him up, not because he is the class clown, but because when I ask him to move so he is bothering other students, he won’t.

Some days he comes in and is capable of settling down and working. Some days, we all just would have a better day if he would work in a corner by himself. It would be really nice if he could figure that out on his own, but he isn’t ready yet.

I once was in a situation where I had three different copies (at least) of a presentation I was going to give on at least three different media and I was really glad I did. I think the presentation finally worked on their equipment a fourth way.

Today I’m going a presentation at another school. I did most of it on my surface, and it’s saved on it, on the SD Card, my Skydrive and on my Moodle Server. I’m about to put it on my harddrive moodle server. I put it on a thumbdrive when I got here and handed to the person’s who I am going to use her workstation.

Over kill?

My head exploded when I tried to do it with port 8080

• Set up Drive to be drive letter M:
• Turn off :80
  • Open Developer Command Prompt
  • Netstat –aon
  • Look for
  • 
  • taskkill /pid #### where #### is the pid

See previous post – my touch screen broke and I now have a new computer. After being told on Tuesday that my old computer would be repaired, I got another phone call last night telling me that they were giving me a Microsoft Store credit for the old computer and closing my Assure account as it would cost too much to repair the computer.

ARGH! Meant I was out $200.

I wasn’t sure I wanted a new one. I am now convinced I want only four brands: Dell, Lenovo and Acer. I’ve had a ton of Acer netbooks in my hands (5?). I’ve had even more Dells, somewhere over 50. I’ve also personally owned several Lenovos, both before and after IBM.

I won’t buy another Gateway (they sell their warranties to companies that go out of business). I am not sure about HP, if you open up some out of the same lot of computers they will have completely different parts inside. Seriously. I also don’t like their tech support.

Best thing about Lenovo, I’ve NEVER needed their tech support.

I found this out the hard way the Friday before New Year’s.

I bought a beautiful Sony Viao computer from the Microsoft Store in Frisco Texas. My first worry is that the store would be closed since it was a Holiday store and the holidays were kind of over. My first step after discovering the screen was broken was to call Microsoft Assure to find out what to do to and they told me I had to take it to Austin.

Thankfully, the Frisco store has been converted to a “specialty” store. It was still open.

However, when I scanned the receipt, I didn’t scan the bar code. Little did I know the bar code was all important. There was an advertisement between the money part and the bar code part of the receipt. Also the employees at the Microsoft store couldn’t find the receipt in their system.

So I had to go back on Saturday. Did I mention that Frisco is about 30 minutes from my house? Then you have to walk through Nordstrom’s to get to the store.

They told me they would “overnight” it to the Austin store. Remember, I told you the Friday before New Year’s.

I got an interesting call today.

When I got the Notebook, I got an Assure Plan. I’m glad I did. They are counting this as an accidental break, and explaining Sony counts it too. The tech even said he can tell from the case I haven’t dropped the machine. However – Sony won’t repair them as manufacture defects.

The tech said they are finding that they are breaking when people put pressure on the center of the back of the screen – just where we’ve been taught to carry notebooks.

Moral the story:

Don’t carry the new touch screen notebooks around while they are open.

I’m finding SnagIt by Techsmith invaluable lately.

I’m doing a presentation for my district for Computer Science students next weekend. I need some of the verbage from the college board site so I’m grabbing what I need with Snag It and putting it in “gag” Power Point. I really ought it put it in Moodle instead.

Probably will by the time I get done.

I’m also got to a bunch of the A+ materials for my students on the Moodle site. I find printing everything with the SnagIt print driver and saving it all as jpegs works best. I find Word gets in my students way—takes to long for them to open.