Three PowerPoint Power-Ups

One of the first few things that teachers start to do when making an effort to use technology in the classroom is to give their lectures on PowerPoint.  The main advantage of this, from my point of view, is that you have a digital copy of your lecture notes that you can change and update very easily, and even distribute to students.  The next step after that might even be to have your students make PowerPoint presentations themselves.  Here are 3 helpful PowerPoint tips:

1. PowerPoint Presentation Checklist (by my friend Mr. Carl Haley) – You can follow this yourself or, even better, provide it to students as a guide for giving good presentations.
2. PowerPoint Templates (free directly from Microsoft) – When the default templates get boring, jazz up your presentations with over 150 free slide templates.  Check out a video of them in action.  Note: these templates are only for PowerPoint 2007.
3. PowerPoint Jeopardy Template – This is the simplest (easiest to edit) template that I found that still maintains that true Jeopardy look & feel.  If you know of a better one, let me know in the comments!

Make a Shortcut to PowerTeacher Gradebook

If your school uses PowerSchool for a student information system like mine does, you are probably familiar with PowerTeacher Gradebook.  It is PowerSchool’s online Java-based grading program.  At first, coming from EasyGrade Pro, I didn’t really like it.  There were fewer features, especially keyboard shortcuts, and so on.  However, the ease of being able to access and update my grades from any internet-connected computer has won me over.   The advantages and disadvantages of using an online gradebook can certainly be argued, but one major annoyance with this particular one is that it’s difficult to access quickly.  Let’s say a student drops by after class and says,

“Mr. Chiou, I was looking at my grades online, and I think you entered the wrong grade for the Awesome Project for me.”

So, you check the student’s grade.  Usually, you have to:

1. Launch your web browser.
2. Go to your school’s PowerTeacher website.
3. Log in.
4. Click on “Gradebook” from the side menu.
5. Click on “Launch Gradebook”.

That’s not exactly the quickest of endeavors, especially during our time-limited days.  But fear not!  Let’s cut down the steps and make it much faster.  To do that, we’re going to put a shortcut to PowerTeacher Gradebook directly on your computer’s desktop.

First, go through steps 1-4 above.  Then, right-click on the “Launch Gradebook” button.  This brings up a menu.  Click “Save Target As…” (or in Firefox choose “Save Link As…”).

Save it onto your computer’s Desktop.  The file that you save is a JNLP file, but it will work just like a shortcut to the PowerTeacher Gradebook.

That’s it!  Now, whenever you want to launch your Gradebook, you just have to:

1. Double-click on the “launchGradeBook” icon on your Desktop.
2. Log in.

Your username and password should be the same as for the PowerTeacher website.  Launching the Gradebook this way is much faster and much more convenient at the same time.  Now, if only the actual grading was this fast…

* Just a quick note, though: in order for this to work, you need to have launched the gradebook the regular way at least once.  Also, if the online gradebook is ever updated to a newer version, you will have to go back and launch it the regular way (in order to download the new version) once again before your spiffy shortcut will work.

We live in the Matrix. Wake up.

This is not so much a tech tip, as a tip about tech.  In the movie The Matrix, the majority of humans have their consciousness trapped in a computer program that fools them into believing that life has gone on as normal, instead of allowing them to see the post-war apocalypse that the world has become.  This reminds me of our current dilemma regarding the technology revolution.   According to the New York Times article I just read:

“The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device”

The phrase “every waking minute” is not an exaggeration.  The article cites a study that finds teenagers spend an average of 7.5 hours a day using those devices.  While this is quite stunning to me, as an educator I think that we need to heavily consider the following advice:

“. . . time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.””

Now, is it the students that are in The Matrix, or are we?  I take this as evidence that we are now at that point in time where tech is ubiquitous.  To continue to deny it is just taking the blue pill.  So, what are we teachers to do?  Well, if you’re here and reading this, you already know the answer.  Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

Dropbox is Easy Sync & Backup

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I love Dropbox.

Now that that’s done, allow me to elaborate.  Put simply, Dropbox is a program that automatically backs up your files online to the web, as well as to any other computer where you have Dropbox installed.  There are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even iPhone.  With a basic free account (which is what I use) you get 2 GB of online storage for your files, although you can increase that to up to 5 GB with referrals or even pay for more storage if you need it.  For just backing up documents, though, the free version should be more than enough for most people.

Online Backup of Your Files

Once you install Dropbox on your computer, it will create a folder called “My Dropbox” that looks nearly identical to other folders on your computer.  Any files that you place in this folder automatically get synced and backed-up to the web.  If you log on to the dropbox website from another computer, all of your files will be there for you.  If something ever happens you your computer, you have an automatic, free, online backup of your files!  That’s the basics.

Super Easy File Syncing

The next real advantage is that you can install Dropbox on more than one computer at a time, and it will sync your files seamlessly between each computer.  For example, let’s say you have a school computer and a home computer.  Install Dropbox on both of them.  Then, if you edit a lesson plan or Powerpoint on your home computer, as long as that file is in your Dropbox folder, it automatically gets sent to your school computer’s Dropbox folder.  No more emailing files to yourself or copying files via a thumbdrive to get that work to school.  It happens automatically.  It’s almost as if you’re accessing the same folder in both places.  I use this to keep all of my work files synchronized between my school laptop and my home computer.

Instant Online Photo Albums

Want to share those photos of some cool project that you did in class or school event that you orchestrated?  In your “My Dropbox” folder, there’s a “Photos” folder.  When you create sub-folders in it, they instantly become online photo albums for any photo that you drop in there.  Instead of emailing all those photos, just copy them into your Dropbox Photos folder, right click on the folder, select “Copy Public Gallery Link”, and email that link to whomever you want.  It will take them to a nicely formatted online photo gallery of all the photos you put into that folder on your computer.

Share Any File with Anybody

Finally, there’s file sharing.  Your “My Dropbox” folder has a “Public” folder in it.  You can put a file into the Public folder, right click on it, and get a web link to that file that you can email to other people, put on your class website, or whatever you need!  Remember how annoying it is when someone emails you a huge file attachment?  (It eats up your email space and takes forever to download, grrr!)  Instead of being that annoying-attachment guy, you just copy the file into your Public Dropbox folder and email the link.  I’ve also used this feature to email my lesson plans as a link to my substitute teacher.  Now, I know Google Docs can be used in this way, too, but it is limited to document-type files only; Dropbox can share any type of file!

Dropbox also has a second type of file-sharing, although I haven’t tried it personally.  If you know someone else with a Dropbox account, you can share entire folders with each other, and they get synced to each of your My Dropbox folders.  In this way, you can collaborate with your colleagues.  Again, Google Docs does this very nicely for docs, spreadsheets, and presentations, with the advantage of not having to install anything, but Dropbox allows you to share any file type, including pictures, videos, programs, or whatever you want!

As a final note, remember that I said you can increase your Dropbox storage for free using referrals?  If you sign up using my Dropbox referral link, then we both get an extra 250 MB of storage space.  Sorry if that sounds a bit solicitous, but if you’re going to try it, you might as well get some extra space, right?

If you are already using Dropbox, or want to get a better idea of how powerful it is, Lifehacker has a lot of articles on additional uses for Dropbox.

So, in conclusion: I love Dropbox, and so should you.

The Many Uses of Google Docs

Google Docs is, at first glance, basically an online version of Microsoft Office.  It has the trinity of office apps: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presenter.  If you were to try to compare it as a true apples-to-apples competitor to Office, it would lose out.  Each of the Google Docs online apps has fewer features than its Office counterpart.  It also requires an Internet connection to function, and as a result can get frustrating to use if your connection is not solid.  (As a side note, Microsoft is also making its own version of an online office suite: Office Live)

However, I would argue that Google Docs is actually an orange to Microsoft Office’s apple.  Despite the fact that it lacks all of the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office as an office suite, it’s networked nature makes it a different beast altogether, with many useful advantages that Microsoft doesn’t have.  I want to outline some of those features here, and explain how you might use them as a teacher.

Price and Ease-of-Use

First and foremost, price: Google Docs is free!  All you have to do is sign up for a Google account (if you don’t already have one).  This is especially good for students; you can recommend Google Docs to them if they can’t afford Microsoft Office, or even if they don’t have a computer (they can use Google Docs on the public library or school computers).  Second, you don’t even need to install it on your computer: you just need a web browser.  Third, the lack of features is, to some, actually a blessing in disguise: less features makes it easier to learn and use.

Online Storage

The next big advantage is that any document that you create or edit in Google Docs gets stored online.  You can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, from any computer with Internet access.  If you have existing documents, you can upload them to Google Docs, and they will be saved there as well.  If you ever need to have an offline copy, it’s easy to export a copy to your computer.  You can, for example, store your lesson plans in Google Docs, and edit or view them from anywhere.  No more carrying around a thumbdrive with your files on it, or emailing your files to yourself so you can have them at school.

Online Publishing

I use this feature all the time: you can instantly “publish” any of your documents as a webpage to share with your students.  Put your syllabus on Google Docs, publish it as a web page, and then link it on your class website.  Put a Powerpoint presentation on Google Docs, publish it as a webpage, and it students can view it online as a presentation.  The greatest benefit of this is that, once you’ve done this, any change you make to the original document is automatically reflected in the public version.  This is great for fixing mistakes in documents or updating them to reflect changes in your classes from year-to-year.  Instead of having to edit both the document and your website, you just edit the document and you’re done.  Here’s an example of a presentation that I use to introduce one of my projects.

Online Collaboration

This is the real power of Google Docs: you can share and collaborate on documents with your colleagues very easily.  Put your lab stockroom inventory in a spreadsheet and share it with all of the science department.  Any time one person makes an edit to the file, everyone sees the change.  There’s no more need to email documents back and forth with various revisions (Google Docs also keeps track of revision history, who changed what).  Doing a collaborative project with another teacher?  Put your project documents on Google Docs, share them with each other, and you each see the changes that the other made.  You can even make custom web forms to easily enter information into a Google docs spreadsheet.