Monday, January 30, 2017

WeVideo Projects And Usage Stats

Students from many disciplines are exercising their digital storytelling voices through Wevideo. Recently, Mrs. Wilmot's AP US History students' created documentaries as part of a major course assessment. A few are included below.



If you would like help creating similar projects with your students, let me know. I would be happy to facilitate a project.

Several times over the last year, I was asked how the district uses Wevideo. From a tech standpoint, the included image shows usage statistics for the month of January, 2017.

Wevideo usage stats for January 2017

Friday, January 20, 2017

Aspen Course Recommendation Columns

Senior high teachers are enduring a bug in Aspen's latest version that causes the course recommendation columns to increase in width each time a grade is entered. After entering just a few grades, the course recommendation columns become so wide, the gradebook is unusable. The folks at Aspen are, reportedly, working on the issue. In the meantime, you can disable the display of course recommendation columns to prevent the columns from clobbering your gradebook. The included video illustrates the process.


Thursday, January 19, 2017

Please Stop Emailing Attachments

CC0 Public Domain
After working with faculty and staff at one of our district schools this week, I am compelled to once again address a pet peeve.  With options such as dropbox, one drive, google drive, google docs, or office 365 for real time collaboration and file sharing, it makes absolutely zero sense to email anything as an attachment. Emailing attachments spreads confusion about the 'real' or current document, where the document might be saved (Is it my downloads or some hidden folder?) while introducing a bevy of additional hassles including file size limits, reduced quality images or pixelated videos. Emailing attachments was great in the early 90s. Today, emailing attachments is a bad practice that needs to stop. If you would like explore alternatives to sending documents and files as email attachments, please contact me.