MAC - Week 1 Blogpost 4

Wk1-1 DB Quickies: DIY Classroom/Presentation Solutions

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Topic #1: Briefly share an experience about using media (visual and/or auditory) in class or during a presentation, focus your comment on any work-arounds or solutions you used when the tech wasn’t quite working or when the tech wasn’t adequate to do what you had originally planned.

Comment thread:

Michael Wood says:

Problem: I remember when I wanted to show my High School seniors the 2007 film version of Wuthering Heights. I used a retail disc and played it on a standard DVD player. The problem is that the captions would not show up. This was a film with an English cast that had some very heavy accents. It was wonderful for the atmosphere of the film, but the students certainly needed those subtitles. The DVD said it had the caption technology, but it required the television to decode the captions. I was using a projector/DVD player set-up, so there was no television to decode. If the students watched this video without the captions we might be wasting valuable class time and worse, students could get disengaged.

Solution: I hooked up my laptop to the projector instead. I played the DVD using Windows Media Player. I turned on the captions from within the player (right-click). We were in business! All captions were easily seen.

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Wk1-2 DB Quickies: DIY Classroom/Presentation Solutions

Topic #2: Tech in your workplace: How has your workplace kept up with tech or not kept up with tech? What kinds of tech things have you bought to use in your classroom/presentation?Please give examples (and have a little fun with the idea…).

Comment thread

Michael Wood says:

Our workplace, as most of you probably report, is about 7 years behind in technology. We have high-speed Internet and even have Wi-Fi in the High School Library. However, the computers are 7-year old Dells. We are running Windows XP and are restricted to earlier versions of Internet Explorer. This means the computers tend to chug along as they attempt to crunch all the multimedia out there. Sometimes it sounds like my computer is about to take flight as the CPU fan ramps up in speed. The District got 600 new computers, but they will replace the 10-year-old computers first.

I cannot do my job without my own laptop. I have had a laptop since day one of my teaching career (5 years ago). I simply can’t operate with all those administrative restrictions over software and having the threat of them taking it all away, or I would have to wait for an administrator if something went wrong. I used to plug my personal laptop into the District network, but they left me a note one day that said “please don’t plug your personal computer into the District network” and they left the Ethernet cord laying lifeless on the desk, unplugged from my laptop (kind of creepy). All this while I was supervising recess! I might have to resort to what other teachers do, that is to use our iPhone or Droid to access our own personal network. Of course, that means $50 a month, but they’re worth it right? Right?