- I can’t believe I used an LCD projector for a year and didn’t know about monitor zooming.
On your Mac, you head into Universal Access in System Preferences and turn it on. One keystroke scales things up and another scales ’em back down.
So when you’re using the online version of your textbook up on the whiteboard and you want to direct focus to a particular problem, mash three buttons and you’ve got it larger.
- A post on to do lists has been in my draft pile near a year now. Suffice to say that kind of tool has been a big part of my recent workflow.
I keep it on GoogleDocs so I can print a fresh one out whenever.
But I just figured out today that if I click through to revisions, I can access any past to-do list. It’s like a journal! Clicking back to April, I see I left myself a note to suspend two particular students, which, I mean, what a blast to the past! Imagine ten years from now, clicking back through to the days when I had to pencil myself a reminder to buy toothpaste.
You oughtta try it. Here’s my three column template. Just import it into GoogleDocs and let the good times roll.
Year: 2007
Total 339 Posts
With respect to my last post (the point of which being that the best way to be an interesting teacher is to be an interested person) if you do the whole RSS thing, how does your categorizing break down? i.e. which percent of your feeds pertain to education, technology, knitting, etc? How far do you stray out of the edubloc?
You show me yours I’ll show you mine. Out of 182 subscriptions:
- education (61)
- design (39)
- photograpy (24)
- film-tv (13)
- music (5)
The rest is an assortment. What does it all mean for method teaching, if anything?
Method acting is tricky to define but โ brusquely put โ actors draw on real emotions to project fictional ones. Famously, in Marathon Man for a scene which called Dustin Hoffman to play haggard and worn out, he stayed up for two days to play the part
The idea is that you don’t sit in your canvas-backed chair pondering what your character would do in a certain situation; you immerse yourself so deeply into your character, you become the character, essentially, and just react naturally to the situation.
There was a time when I’d sit in front of my computer, the cursor blinking patiently while I tried to find an interesting angle on my lesson. I’d sit and think until I thought of something interesting.
After this last really good year, after this last weekend talking to Mike at a wedding reception, I’ve decided I am a Method Teacher.
I spent the last year acquainting myself with an RSS reader, becoming interested in several dumptrucks worth of extracurriculars, flagging them towards my front door on daily basis, and cuing them to unload.
I am, lately, an obsessively, compulsively interested person and so my natural inclination is to find an interesting angle on any given topic. I can’t help it anymore. More to the point, I can’t help sharing it with my students.
This is Method Teaching.
That last video didn’t make it to the RSS feed. Anyone know โ top of the head โ the magic HTML codewords to get embedded video to, well, embed?
[dy/dan completists oughtta click on through to the post itself. Early reviews have been generous.]
This is the video that ran me into the ground this summer. Hardest I’ve worked on anything.
Mount Hermon Summer Staff Slideshow 2007 from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.