Reflector and Airplay -- Making It Work!

The Reflector app for the Macbook is a great tool for projecting your iPad on to a screen, but to be honest, the program is glitchy. I see two problems that always see to come up for teachers in the classroom, but there are two simply solutions that will fix the vast majority of the glitches you experience with Reflector.

The first problem I see commonly is that students aren't able to get their iPads to work on Reflector -- their iPads simply don't attach to the program or Airplay seems to mysteriously disappear as an option on their iPads. First solution: they need to restart their iPads! If you plan to have students project their work with Airplay and Reflector -- have them all restart their iPads at the beginning of the lesson. This will eliminate 95% of the issues. I promise!

The second problem I commonly see is teachers having their iPads drop off of Reflector in the middle of a lesson. This is due to having Auto-Lock turned on. Second solution: I have include a screen shot of how to adjust the settings. I recommend that when you are planning to use your iPad for a lesson that involves projecting through Reflector -- change your Auto-Lock to never.

Korea IS Phoenix Student Film Festival March 15, 2014

Http://www.kis.or.kr

I'm proud to announce that the KIS Phoenix Student Film Festival will be on March 15, 2014 on the campus of KIS, but you don't have to be there to participate in the action. The festival is open to students from anywhere in the world. Students simply need to create their excellent films, upload them to Youtube or Vimeo, and then visit our website to submit the required Google Form with the link to the film. All entries with proper (virtual) paperwork will be viewed and judged by the students of our high school Film Makers' Club. Winners will be announced at the festival and their films will be viewed by the audience. Awards for winners in each age category and genre will also be provided thanks to the High School PTO. For those who can join the physical film festival, there will be a 6-hour Movie Challenge during the day before the film festival. Students will be placed in groups and then storyboard, shoot, and edit a film all in 6 short hours. It will be a full day of fun and excitement about movie making -- come and join us!

Sharing Rubrics in Schoology -- It can be done!

During a PD session on October 3rd, Ben Summerton (@bsummerton), Jay Londgren, and Cassie Summerton did a fantastic Schoology help session. And during that session we discovered a work-around for sharing rubrics from courses that is pretty clever. If you want to share a rubric with a colleague the first step is to add them to your course and make them an admin. Once they are admin of the course, they can go into grade book set up and copy the rubric to their courses. It is a little clunky and tiresome, but a great way to share a rubric. If you are worried about them being an admin of your course, once the rubric(s) are shared, simply remove your colleague from your course.

Request Read Receipt in Gmail

Sometimes you simply want to know if someone has read the email you sent or not. Gmail has this feature and it is called Request Read Receipt. It was formerly in the labs section, but now has become part of the standard Gmail. You can find it in your compose window in the more options drop down menu.

Interview from the Digital Showcase Asia

Sharing Settings on a Google Form

Today one of our English teachers, Jim Burwell, stopped by the EdTech office with a great question. His problem was that everyone had permission to edit his Google Form. After some hunting around on Jim's part, he discovered the the share settings for Forms work a little differently now. Now that the spreadsheet and form are completely separate from each other, the Form settings assume that you would want people to fill it out, so you can embed or email it to people without making it public, because the public refers to who can edit the form. Let me write that again, because it is very important -- public means people can edit the form. If you don't want people to edit your form, make it private or share it to only the people you want to collaborate with. This is a large change from the way forms perviously worked, so please be careful. Now go forth and collect data!