Demo Open House Presentation and Video

Here's an example of how you might create a course overview presentation and then use screencasting software to record and post the presentation with a voiceover to YouTube. If you link your teacher site or blog to these products, your parents/guardians who cannot attend or who miss part of your presentation for any reason will be able to review what they've missed. These techniques have many additional useful applications, and if you're interested in how to use the tools or implement the results, please let me know (or for BMS Staff, stop by Friday for some training!)

Here's a link to the Prezi with active links to additional resources: http://prezi.com/bdrivanqwakk/open-house-2013/

…and to the YouTube recording: http://youtu.be/xPuwQ6AcjTU

Create custom ‘how-to’ videos

Camtasia Studio has some nice effects like blur, fade-in, fade-out, etc., which you can see in the embedded demo below, but even with the 40% teacher discount, it’s pricey, but definitely worth it if you want to make a lot of these! You can can create very effective free clips using other tools like screencast-o-matic, which is the web-based screen recording tool which I teach my students to use. In this demo, you can see how to setup a custom Google Sheet for a project like the Den rotations which our campus is currently using.

Help parents stay informed!

…with this ‘all hands’ effort! We’ve recently instituted campus-wide edited weekly parent newsletters and added links to our site.  It’s easy to update, highly informative, collaborative, and posts automatically :)

Here are the steps to do the same if you’re interested:

1. Create GDoc templates for each grade level, dept., etc.
2. Share them with a wide circle of editors (or your entire staff, as we have done)
3. Post links for quick access for editors (we use a links map)
4. Add links in an embedded GDoc on your campus site

Here’s what this might look like (using our example): http://youtu.be/n3bx7yeG3sQ

Qvilt Chrome Extension

If you monitor lots of Google Docs, this extension is an extremely useful way to receive notifications and keep tabs on recent edits on any of them… it shows what’s been edited, who has done the edits and highlights the most recent changes for all documents and it sends you a daily email digest of those changes automatically. Here’s a link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/qvilt/lbmmkncdkfmlbalgpcjjjffihmfephlb