I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking [...]

Dean Shareski and Cindy Barnsley gave me valuable (though tactfully veiled) criticism for my original “Cutting the Crap (from Student Movies)” video. To paraphrase, “That first part was really good.” I took the hint. I’ve divided the original into two shorter efforts, and added end credits attributing the Flickr photos I used to model that [...]

Eight minutes on how to 1) find content on Creative Commons, 2) use Zamzar to download YouTube and other videos for mashups. (It’s also posted on my “Teaching Gallery” static page.) [Update: Photos credited in final titles, plus CC licensing added.] Coming in Episode 2: Still Photo Skills: Advanced use of the Ken Burns Effect.

Long presentations are great and all, but maybe quickies have their place as well. I can see the need. Here’s a 2-minute snippet from a presentation I gave to parents to launch our 1:1 Apple Laptop initiative back in August. I simply explain Clustrmaps by showing it on a blog with world-wide readers….written by a [...]

That has to be the geekiest title I’ve ever written. I promise it’s English. Anyway: Just a little tutorial share about one of the million reasons I love Firefox web-browser (and curse at my students lovingly when they open things in Internet Explorer, or even Safari). I’m talking about Firefox Addons. This 4 minute tutorial [...]

Back in August, I posted a screencast called “What is Blogging?” for audiences, educational and otherwise, needing a basic introduction to the read/write aspects of this new world. Since I’m sponsoring a Web 2.0 club at school this year, and also setting my AP Literature students up with their own WordPress MU blogs on our [...]

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works [...]

Just sharing this tutorial I made for my staff (95% of whom will not watch it, and therefore spend the rest of their lives making and grading quizzes and tests the hard way). It shows one way to use class Scribe Blogs to create test and quiz items on Moodle. Moodle then auto-grades, reports correct [...]