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Electronic Student Portfolios

Delsie — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:24:51 +0000

At the Language Dept. we are trying to start using electronic student portfolios. At their teacher’s request, the student will choose a sample of their best work from their language class (this can be extended to other classes as well) in any given year. The portfolio should be available for other teachers to see in future years. We decided that it would be a good idea for this to be be stored as a Google Document since it avoids storing CDs, thumb drives, etc. Each teacher could be made a viewer by the student (who will own the document) as needed.

The document would be titled:

Last Name, First Name, year of graduation, STJ Academy

and it will be in stjlabs.

I’m thinking that a Presentation would be more versatile than a Document since we can then upload pictures as well as written documents.

If you are doing electronic portfolios already, or if you have any thoughts on this, please let me know. Thanks. My stjlabs address is: delsie@stjlabs.com.

Welcome Back

Josh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:58:43 +0000

I will be running training refresher classes during the first two months of school. If you’d like to attend one of the classes, email me at jseamon@stjacademy.org.

- Josh

Late Night Reading

Josh — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:51:23 +0000

Yah, I should be sleeping, but instead I’m reading about:

http://flatclassroomproject2008.wikispaces.com/

http://horizonproject2008.wikispaces.com/

http://digiteen2008.wikispaces.com/

http://www.nmc.org/publications/2008-horizon-report

I’m too tired to fully summarize what I have been reading beyond these simple words: Way. Too. Cool.

Google @ SJA

Josh — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:08:55 +0000

Here are the slides for a presentation I will be giving to the SJA Language Department on Tuesday, 9/16.

BYKI (Before you know it)

Delsie — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:21:41 +0000

I have been searching for a way to give my students a way to listen to the daily vocabulary at home. During the semester I have tried, with Josh’s considerable help, to devise a delivery system. I thought I was all set but then I found this other website that creates flash cards with sound. It also sets up games for the kids to play with the flash cards. It is very easy for the teacher to set up and I think more engaging for the student than just the written word and the sound. I haven’t had any feedback from the kids yet and I’ll let you know when they do. My card lists are in:

http://www.byki.com/user/dgandiastj

Converting to PDF

Josh — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:47:24 +0000

Digital documents are created with many different programs. Many of my students use various versions of MS Office and some use Open Office. Others use Mac Pages and some use Wordpad. Over the years I have become pretty good at dealing with just about any kind of file format that’s thrown at me. I know lots of work-arounds and small tricks to deal with esoteric file formats that I am sure to run into almost daily.

I’ve also run into this problem from the other side. I’ve created documents for distribution that people on the receiving end haven’t been able to deal with. This has happened when I’ve sent out Office2007 (docx) files, as well as Pages documents.

One file format that is almost “universally openable” is PDF, or portable document format. Pages can export to pdf and so can some other document creation tools, but for the most part you have to jump through some hoops or pay some money to convert your document to PDF. If you do a search for “PDF conversion tools” you’ll come across LOTS of tools that are chalked full of crap, very poorly written, full of spyware, or all of those things.

Well, I stopped searching about 6 months ago when I came across two very useful and free pdf creation tools:

The first tool I found was PDFOnline. All you have to do is upload your document through their webpage and specify an email address. The uploaded document will be converted to PDF without and sort of embeded logo and emailed to the specified account. In my experience it never took more than 10 minutes for a document to be converted. (The larger the document the longer the conversion time.) PDFOnline is particularly useful on locked down systems where you can’t install the next option…

The second tool I found is the VERY useful CutePDF Writer printer driver. After you install the driver, you can create PDF documents from any application that you can print from. All you need to do is print to the printer driver (which will show up as a printer) and a save-as screen will pop up allowing you to save your new PDF document anywhere you want. Good stuff.