KKUATeach

Today I’m reviewing a photo editing tool, fotor, for my Cool Tool review. Unfortunately, this is the easiest review I’ve done. Right after we signed up for Cool Tools to review, I had a need for a photo editor. Thinking I’d be efficient, I figured I would try fotor out for my needs and for my review. To use the app on my laptop, I needed to download it. That’s when the trouble started. In addition to the photo editing app, I got a browser and a security app – neither which I knew was coming or agreed to. As far as I’m concerned, that’s dirty pool. The first thing I did when I noticed these extra apps was to uninstall fotor. After I did that, the app asked for feedback as to why I was giving it the boot.   I filled out the form and told them it was because I found these other programs and if it wasn’t because of them, they should let me know and I’d try again.   That was about 6 weeks ago. I haven’t heard yet so I’m going on the assumption that the extra programs on my devi...

This post will be about the different productivity tools I think I’ll be using in my classroom. The first will be some sort of desktop/laptop. With those tools, I can see myself using several applications and systems. Calendar – I currently use Google Calendar for keeping family activities straight, and I can see me creating a new calendar just for my classes. That will give me a way to keep track of events from major (testing, vacations etc.) to due dates of assignments. If I am in a school with Google Classroom, I can also share the calendar with my students so they can see important things. I would also consider an organization app like Wunderlist . Email – I can see that as being an important way of interacting with administration and parents. Google – In this class and others in the program, I’ve learned that there is a huge number of things out there to help teachers. From lesson plans to work sheets to class room activities, I plan to honor my previous career...

So, at the end of my last post, I had all my mandatory coaching training done, now I just have to wait until the paperwork gets through the school district and the state for my permit comes through. I have to wait until that is all done before contact with the team, so for now I’m focusing honing what I know about the mechanics and adding new drills and game play strategies to my toolbox. My first go-to for this is the US Lacrosse Coaches Education Program. As I already mentioned before, the Level 1 certification I hold focused on the basic techniques – how to teach a kid to pass, catch, shoot and pick up a ground ball. If you’ve ever watched a youth or developmental middle school game, you see how important it is to focus on the fundamentals of these particular tasks. The level 1 courses also gave me important lessons on how to teach the proper way for kids to hit – making sure we are playing a safe and controlled, yet physical, game of lacrosse without reverting to ...

This week, I’m reviewing a presentation Cool Tool called Slidestory. From their website, Slidestory is a way to create and share presentations .   At first, I thought this would be similar to Google Slides or Powerpoint, but it’s a bit different. What the product does it allow you to record your own narration over top of a series of picture files of your choice. Think being able to record a stereotypical “our vacation photos from an old-style carrousel slide projector” event. As I went to check this product out, three things jumped out at me. The first, the web site shows it’s a beta version. Beta software puts me on guard to start, so immediately I’m skeptical. In order to use it, you also need to create a free account. Now I’ve created accounts with several applications, but the Beta nature had me hesitate a bit more. Then, I noticed at the bottom of the page that you had to download a client application onto your own devices.   Now alarms are officially going off ...

Starting with the generic, Dr. Thornburg’s article on his theory of learning spaces made sense to me. .   While pondering (in my cave) about the video we watched in class , I started to realize the connection of the cave and the watering hole (our blogs in this case) are really helping my understanding of the material we all learning in this program. But there was something about the model, as presented in the video, that was bugging me. The first was how my mind looked at the three spaces and immediately thought of sequential steps, based on how the material was presented. Eventually I got through this by realizing the cave/watering hole stages intermix. The other problem I had went deeper. It seemed something was missing. As it turns out, so does Dr. Thornburg.  In the presented article, Dr. Thornburg adds the Lifespace to the initial model to deepen the understanding by doing. That brought it all together for me. Just in this program, we are exposed to the Life stage ...

There is one large difference in becoming a coach at the community youth level and high school varsity – bureaucracy. Youth activities rely so much on volunteers they are usually just happy to get anybody, let alone somebody who knows the game. I was certified in CPR/AED and First Aid through work, so I at least had that, although in the early years of the club they hadn’t started requiring those certificates. Before I can have contact with the high school kids, I need a valid Pupil Activity Permit from the Ohio Department of Education. There are some courses/certifications that were no brainers – First Aid, CPR and concussion awareness. A biggie, however, is the Fundamentals of Coaching through the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS).   This is a mandatory training and is available on-line through the NFHS learning portal ($65). This was a little bit different than the coaching basics I had for my US Lacrosse certification. Some of the new information is empha...

As anybody that has been in a classroom or business conference room in the last 10 years knows, many spaces in which somebody is presenting information have some sort projection technology installed. It may be an interactive white board, LCD projector or even the growing use of interactive LED flatscreens. (Interesting summary here on one analyst’s view of what’s going to happen to interactive whiteboards in North America over the next few years.) So instead of telling you what you already know about the importance and utility of some sort of presentation package, I’m going to instead do a bit of comparison between Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. I’m going to leave Keynote and Prezi out of the comparison. I seldom dip into the Mac world, so I don’t know much about Apple’s presentation tool, Keynote, to help. The quick checks I found on Prezi seem to indicate it’s growing in use, but seems to lag the “big three” in use. Check out others comparisons here or h...