Technology

Video Class Update

September 9, 2011
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The drama lady is going to kill me. My fledgling video class has taken over the drama room, and I have my sights set on acquiring more classroom real estate from the music department. Soon I will control more classroom space than three or four “regular” teachers. Quick refresher goes here. In a comic book, the main character occasionally  talks to him or herself for awhile, and catches up those readers who may not be so loyal as to have read every issue. So it’s not strictly a flashback; more of a refresher or a  ”previously on” sort of thing. And so, previously on mrC’s blog…  I’ll be “teaching” (more like figuring how to teach) a seventh grade elective class in video production. I’ll have one period of seventh graders and $70,000 worth of computers and video equipment.  Our share of the fees charged to our local cable company for their franchise to extort the community has been sitting in the bank for years collecting interest. We’re the only secondary school left in the district who hadn’t spent their money. In order to spend the money, you have to give the cable company footage to fill up the time on

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What I’m Doing Instead of Blogging

June 6, 2011
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Mental Floss Question from last week: The Pope has one but doesn’t use it. Your dad has one, and your mom uses it. Nuns do not need one. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big one, and Michael J. Fox’s is quite small. What is it? (An oldie, but a goody. Answer at the end.) As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been as regular lately. (Get your minds out of the gutter! I’m talking about posting here.) Here’s what I’ve been doing instead: 1. Fighting with again. This time it’s about the new spam filter for our e-mail system. In short: it sucks. It lets  more spam through and blocks a lot of addresses that used to go through. Including my wife’s. Which is hosted on my domain. Hmmm. Coincidence? Maaaaaybe. Fixable? Easily. Fixed yet?  Of course not. I finally realized why I have so much trouble with . is just like Sarah Palin. Pass the buck, blame the lamestream teacher, spout meaningless catchphrases (“have you rebooted?”), talk in that “lilt,”  (“can’t she get a G-mail account just for this?”), smile a lot, and not really do anything but toe

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Soundz!

March 12, 2010
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In the previous post, I touted the beauty of The Timer and havoc one might wreak with it upon the psyches of sensitive seventh graders. This is just a quick update to that. The link at the end of this post will take you to a directory with my stash of timer sounds. You can go find your own on the net — look for .wav files — but here are some to get you started. Tips: Change the sounds at random intervals. (Read the Read Me file for how to. It’s easy.) Surreptitiously crank up the volume after the start sound, so that the alarm sound has maximum impact (sometimes literally). Try to be talking just before the time runs out, so that they are distracted when it does. Then casually finish your sentence after they scream. Say, “I never get tired of that,” after they fall out of their desks. (at the start) Say, “The clock’s running; your mouth shouldn’t be.” Say, “Excuse me, must be that breakfast burrito,” after the raspberry sound. After time expires, but before you reset, if you click go you get the start and alarm sounds back-to-back. Kinda fun if you choose your

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The Timer Redux

March 10, 2010
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The Timer Redux

This one isn’t exactly a rerun per se…let’s call it more of a rewrite… This year’s crew has been a bit more, shall we say, trying, than any in recent memory. They’re nice enough for seventh graders and all, but they are really frying my bacon this year. So I have to get my kicks where I can…to sort of…take the edge off. I devoted a short post to THE TIMER (AKA: THE CLOCK) way back when this whole blog thang started in ’08, but lately The Timer has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance, so I thought I’d share the wealth again. Several years ago I started noticing that the incoming seventh graders were very used to getting as much time as they needed to finish warm ups and quizzes and such. The idea of a timed test or quiz was completely alien to them. I couldn’t cope. At the time, I was using a Gateway Destination setup with a 32″ inch monitor and some fine speakers, so I went searching for a little countdown clock I could put in the corner of the screen to start training these kids to work with/against the clock. “How much time

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Near Catastrophe

January 7, 2010
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Today I came much closer to a catastrophic tech failure than I’m used to. And it happened live in class. Now, as my loyal readers may have guessed, I don’t have many tech failures, beyond finicky overhead bulbs and such. (In fact, I get to play the Fonz quite a bit with my overhead. It must have a loose connection to the bulb, because if I’m a bit too forceful in my pointing with my pen, the bulb goes out. So then I whack it a certain way on the side, and it works again. I bat about .900 with the restoring whack, and I give the thumbs up, but none of them know who the Fonz was. They are still slightly awed in their seventh grade way. It’s even better when I do the backside kick to my class computer – it’s on the floor under my center table – to quiet the occasionally noisy cooling fan. They love that one. ) First, I am mostly religious about backing up data. My CPS databases are on a flash drive which is backed up to my space on the school server (which is supposedly backed up nightly) and every now and then

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Random Featured Post

“Do you love me?” (Also: Weird “Week”)

Wotta “week.” Considering how tired I am, I can’t believe it was only a three-day week – for some reason we had a 4-day weekend for Veterans’ day. And I done clean forgot that I was supposed to give the “District Benchmark Test #1″ (that’s a whole ‘nother post) by Friday. So we spent Wednesday darkening ovals to generate data for the district, AND there was a “multi-media” assembly that, amid the rock and rap, touted the beauty of trust and honesty (also: don’t do those things which I obviously can’t mention, because ads for them started appearing here). AND, yesterday was “parent visitation day.” Whole lotta scare quotes today too. Usually I get a pretty good turnout for these parent visitation days (it sounds like a Catholic holiday). Our previous principal (our present principal is an FNG, both to the job of principal AND to our school) instituted these as a sort of PR for parents. Many parents of ms’ers are more than a little leery of sending their little angels to the big bad junior high. (You should have seen the reaction a few years ago when the district proposed making our school 6-8. OMG. You’d have thought [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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