Mister V’s Class

A quick note to my 2008-2009 students:

Thanks for the great year. I fully and completely enjoyed having you all in my class. I hope you will remember some of the converstions in this class.

Have an excellent summer!

Mr V

Redeveloping my presentations and material year to year, I’ve been waiting for the search engine that looks for:

1. Historical Information - encyclopedic
2. Images
3. Video

with any given search term (for example: Boston Tea Party). I’m still in the process of review, but Navify seems to be what I’m looking for. Type in the search terms, and it returns wikipedia articles, flickr images, and youtube video - all in one spot. Of course, to get its full effect, you need to use the search engine at home, where school filters don’t interfer.

On your new computers you have the most excellent program called “Jing” (look under “all programs - it’s called “Tech Smith”).

What does Jing do? First,  it allows you to camputer pictures of what’s on your computer screen. You can then add text, shapes, highlights, etc. to the picture. Second, it lets you create screencasts of what your doing on screen. A screencast is a video recording - complete with voice - of what’s happening on your computer screen.

Why use Jing? I’ve found it handy in a few instances:

1. Directions - I’ll create screencasts “showing” students what I want them to do on the computer. Oftentimes, showing is the easiest way to reach students.
2. Grabbing images for instructions. I’ll often snatch maps, graphs, and pictures from worksheets for students to use in different contexts.