Last week we talked about making quality student video projects in regular classes as part of a BYOD environment. From HippoBytes HB250: Intermediate Video Production:

Video projects are fun to make, can assess students’ content knowledge, and help them practice new skills.

Too often, they are also poorly done. The fact that having a phone or tablet makes it easy to film something does not also mean that it is easy to make a good video.

There are, however, easy-to-teach principles that will help your students shoot and edit great video. This session taught us how.

When I was in high school, at the beginning of every summer we would take a 6am Northwest Airlines flight out of Don Muang Airport to SeaTac via Narita. It involved waking up at 3am, hauling four to six suitcases into a Toyota Hiace van, and spending the next 1-2 hours shuffling bleary-eyed through the airport formalities. I used to think that was as hard as airplane travel got. Then, I moved to Africa. Continue reading Worst. Flight. Ever. →

My latest HippoBytes was about helping students to deliver powerful presentations, like the students in the video below:

From HB120: Powerful Presentations:

Before we tell our students to write essays, we teach them to write paragraphs. Before we tell them to play soccer, we teach them how to handle the ball. Before we tell them to do a science experiment, we teach them about safety and procedures. Yet so often we tell them to do presentations without actually teaching them how to present. And knowing how to make a Powerpoint is not the same thing as knowing how to present. In this session, we learned four principles for creating and delivering powerful presentations.

We follow a whitelisting policy on our network, only allowing hosts through certain ports on the firewall, like 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS. All other ports are blocked between 7am and 3pm. This helps us cut down on unwanted traffic, especially BitTorrent.

However, there are situations where we want to allow a host on the network access to wider range of ports. For example, Skype uses random ports to communicate; it’s not possible to whitelist it (unless you get Layer7 traffic shaping to work, which last I heard was dicey). When our teachers do Mystery Skypes or our director wants to interview prospective candidates they need unrestricted access through the firewall.

To do this, we set up a special IP address that has unlimited access, and assign that IP address to the computer we want using a static DHCP lease. What follows are the steps to do it. Continue reading Setting Up Privileged Hosts in pfSense →

I was going to start by talking about visual literacy as a new buzzword, but the skill of representing information visually is actually a developed field. The pie chart was first developed by William Playfair in 1801, and in 1858 Florence Nightingale create the world’s first infographic to impress upon Parliament the severity of British troop mortality in the Crimea¹. Most standards relate to written literacy, with good cause, but being persuasive across multiple formats can only help our students. With that in mind, two of my recent trainings addressed using digital posters, graphic design, and image editing using browser-based tools in lieu of expensive, difficult-to-manage software:

HippoBytes HB241: Intro to Image Editing

Image editing programs are an under-appreciated tool. When I wanted to join the Hilton health club in Kuwait under the married couples’ rate, I was able to use Adobe Photoshop to create a marriage certificate by altering Barack Obama’s (available online) to have my name and my fake wife’s instead, saving me hundreds of dollars. There are numerous classroom applications as well, from creating posters to propaganda to collages. In this session we learned the basic principles underlying all image-editing programs, and applied those programs using the free web app Pixlr Editor.

HippoBytes HB242: Digital Canvas

Writing is a critical skills for success. It’s also important, though, to give students the opportunity to access content and show their understanding in a variety of ways, whether to keep weak writers engaged or to work on new skills such as visual literacy. The classic poster is an assignment that can be easily updated and extended to work with digital tools.

In this session, we went through three components of creating visualizations of knowledge (my fancy word for “posters”): finding Creative Commons-licensed images, learning and applying basic graphic design principles, and using a tool appropriate to the task.

iPads are amazing. Revolutionary. Even before the educational uses, they created an entirely new product category. With educational apps they finally enable technology integration in a mode that is developmentally appropriate.

My school doesn’t really have those. At least, not at scale for elementary school (though my next school has them 1:1 for middle school). Finding developmentally appropriate tools for elementary students using our existing Mac Minis has thus been a challenge. Two of my recent trainings have focused on free tools that facilitate digital elementary creativity, and are appropriate for upper elementary and in the case of digital storytelling also lower elementary:

Writing is a critical skills for success. It’s also important, though, to give students the opportunity to access content and show their understanding in a variety of ways, whether to keep weak writers engaged or to work on new skills such as visual literacy. The classic poster is an assignment that can be easily updated and extended to work with digital tools. – HippoBytes, Digital Canvas

Some important Common Core/AERO standards for writing are developing the ability to tell narratives and informative/explanatory texts and using technology to produce and publish written work collaboratively. In this HippoBytes we learned how to use Storyjumper, MyStorymaker and Google Slides to meet these standards. – HippoBytes, Digital Storytelling