Well – that’s the long answer too. PowerPoint wins this one.

Regretfully yours,

Dan Meyer

Sorry, I just found your blog through..umm..one of the many edublogs on my reader and have been going through the archives. I just convinced my school to switch to Keynote and am loving it. I’m not a ninja at it like you but I’m starting to get it. One quick thing though, I bought one of those Wacom Bamboo tablets (definite recommended buy – $100 at best buy) and would use it to write on and annotate Powerpoints. Then I’d save the powerpoint, audio, and annotations using Snapzpro and post them (I’d have an example but my computer got wiped right after I took them down for the school year)

So..that’s a long way of saying, do you know of any way to make this happen on Keynote? There doesn’t seem to be a Pen function I can find. Perhaps layer another program over keynote?

I bought my own projector a Dell for 650….the bulb just went out, but I joined the technology committee at our school and lobbied for a “1%” plan. It is a small rural school in upstate Ny with a budget around 15 million. Our Tech Committee put in for “1%” of the budget (150 grand) to spend on district wide technology. This went to projectors for any teacher who would use it.

The second is easier to address than the first. No money, no way this happens. Frankly, though, if I ran a school, I’d run on the platform of a laptop, an LCD projector, and excellent training for every teacher. As a teacher, if either of these tools conked out, they’d form the top and the entire sum of my wishlist. They’re that essential.

To your other concern, I teach the exact same subjects as last year and still take a couple hours of work home each night. Much less than last year, but it’s still a bother.

I figure, though, that as I teach section after section this way, not only does the process become easier but the material is so good it can weather textbook adoptions and school changes.

The area of a pentagon won’t change so even though I’ll have to copy and paste it to some other part o the timeline, I won’t have to scrap it entirely. This has been my experience as well as my ongoing hope.

1) The investment up front saves time in the future. That presupposes one will teach the same classes in the future. In Ontario schools, starting teachers often spend the first five to ten years being bounced from subject to subject, and given that curriculum reviews take place every 8 to 10 years, I’m not sure that such a method would be feasible for starting teachers in this scenario.

2) The LCD technology is of course requisite, many low-budget rural schools cannot afford this.

I am hoping that you’ll counter these points and tell me I’m wrong, because I’d love to get on board.