Group items tagged

You can even add video and/or audio by recording it directly within the site! SlideSix supports a ton of different presentation formats: PPTX (PowerPoint 2007) PPT/PPS (PowerPoint 97/2000/XP) PDF (Adobe Acrobat) ODP/SXI (Open Office) MOV (QuickTime)

by Grace Rubenstein AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Lawrence Township Narrated by Grace Rubenstein It is one thing to create change inside a classroom -- the best teachers, masters of their one-room domains, break from tradition and foster innovative learning environments all the time. A harder task, which a growing number of schools are proving can be done, is to convert an entire school to embrace new practices that fulfill the changing educational demands of our age. Then comes the next -- and the messiest -- frontier, the entity most resistant to cohesive change: the school district. Five years ago, administrators in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, in the northeast corner of Indianapolis, tackled this challenge. With a $5.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, a local philanthropic organization, they set out to transform the prevailing vision of what preK-12 education is for -- as one district official put it, "to meet the needs of the kids' future, and not the teachers' past." They decided that they needed to teach a modern set of skills in a student-centered way. Critical thinking, self-direction, and cultural competency, along with fluency in technology, information resources, and visual and graphic presentations. These were the elements of digital age literacy the district believed its students would need in the twenty-first century. Educating students for the new era demanded not only new content, they believed, but also new teaching methods. Teachers needed to recast themselves as facilitators, and to demand that students take more ownership of their learning. Into Focus Visit classrooms in Lawrence Township -- at least those where the change has caught on -- and you'll see kids inventing their own projects, using computers in daily work, involving themselves in community initiatives, and inquiring on their own about continued . . . 1234567next ›last » This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, June 2007

Evident

Easy to Use

Technology threatens to reorder those behavior patterns

On my screencasts: I’m not at liberty to discuss the tool I use (you’ll hear soon enough). However, most people ask about the screencasts because of the clarity. Here’s the secret: Capture your screen so you don’t have to compress the SWF. For example, this demo was captured at 960×600 and it’s locked into the player at 960×600. Many people will do a full screen capture at 1024×768. Then they want to put it on the slide which is 720×540. So the SWF gets published down which causes degradation. The next secret is to lock your player so that the image quality remains. Many people will allow the player to scale which causes degradation. Tip: to do a full screen capture, bring your monitor resolution down (it will look fuzzy). Then when you’re done, bring the resolution back up and it will look crisp. I am on a 30″ monitor with a 2560×1600 resolution, but I can bring it down to 960×600 and still get a decent full screen capture. That’s how I did all of the Articulate product tutorials.