Odyssey Academy Tech Corner

For a little over a year now I have been using an application called LastPass to store the usernames and passwords to the over 100 accounts I have with various websites. Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, personal and work e-mail accounts, the list goes on and on. I generally can’t make it through the first five or 10-minutes of my work day without having to log into half a dozen websites. Then, there are the other dozen websites that I log into periodically throughout the week.

Now, I could choose to be really unsafe and attempt to use the same username and password combination for every website I ever must log into, but this is a really bad idea for a lot of reasons. It’s also not really possible. Some websites require a specific amount of characters for passwords. Some websites need a capital letter, or a number, or a special character. Some websites don’t accept special characters in passwords. Some websites even may limit the amount of characters you can even use for your password! Most frequently the problem with one username and password combination is the fact that some websites require you to change your password to something completely unique every so often. You all use the Internet, everyone has experience with this. Read the rest of this entry »

Mrs. Steele attended the TCEA Tots & Technology Conference with me and several other OA teachers in June. She chose to write about using pictures as starting points for writing. After reading through the post, I hope you all take some time to check out the links and applications discussed.

I love photos! I have a camera with me all the time. So, when I saw the title of this session I knew I had to attend.  It was well worth it! The message was simple; pictures aren’t just for making things pretty, but to create emotion, to see and feel the written words and to give a visual that many of us need.  Gail Lovely, the presenter, demonstrated this by showing a slide show, with words only, about the Tsunami in Japan. Then, she repeated the show with relevant pictures added. This changed the perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Background

Over the summer, I will be posting several articles written by OA teachers who have attended technology training sessions and conferences. Mrs. Dorr attended the TCEA Tots & Technology Conference with me and several other OA teachers in June. She chose to write about a program she learned about called YouTube Downloader. After reading through the post, I hope you all check out the links and applications discussed.

I wish everyone could have attended the Tots and Technology: Learning in the Elementary Classroom conference in Galveston. There was so much good stuff to learn! The first tip I tried out when I got home was to download an app that will forever change how I use YouTube in my classroom.

Have you ever found the perfect YouTube video to show your students, only to have it pause repeatedly in order to buffer?  If so, you are sure to appreciate the YouTube Downloader. Read the rest of this entry »