Class 460's PowerPoint movies

Ms. Smith-Thomas's class has been working on creating PowerPoint presentations.

We started with the basics of Powerpoint such as adding slides and text. WE discussed what a bullet point is, how to edit and revise bullets to make them clear and concise, and how to add create appropriate and relevant content.

Once the slides were done students looked to relevant and appropriate pictures using Google to add to their presentations.

Once all the elements were in (titles, bullets, pictures) students added Animations to all the elements.

After animations students added Transitions to all the slides, set with timings, so the slides would advance automatically after the viewer read the information.

Once everything was complete, students would watch each other's presentations to provide feedback and help each other with any final editing and revising.

When they were ready to turn in, students did a "Save as Movie" to turn the presentations into .mov files.
(side note - unfortunately when saving out as a movie the animations, transitions, and timings don't carry over, so not all elements are readily available via YouTube - we'll be addeing PowerPoint shows to this page shortly to showcase the full compliment of student work)

They they used the class DropItTo.me site to upload it to Mr. Casal's Dropbox. From there Mr. Casal added them to his ps10.org YouTube channel and embedded them here...

Enjoy!
(4 students are finished and currently posted. these 4 studies are in the process of assisting the other 7 in completing, exporting, and uploading their movies)

Adobe Voice - a quick iPad app review

Adobe recently released a new app, Adobe Voice.

It's subtitle is "Show your story."

And it's just that simple. Choose your photos. Record your audio story to match. Save. Publish. Share. Very simple, but very elegant and powerful at the same time.

Here is my first attempt at using the app...

Why Blogger with students?

I use Blogger with my students. I have two classes currently running fully independent blogs. One 3rd grade class and one 5th grade class.

I often get asked why I chose Blogger over some of the other blogging platforms, namely Kidblog, EduBlogs, or even WordPress.

My choice was based on the following thoughts:

Email spam - sniffing out the bad, even from trusted sources

This post is a follow-up, of sorts, to the previous "Twitter spam" and "Phishing" posts. In making the slide deck about Twitter spam I realized there were a few different variations of spam in general, especially within emails.

This post deals specifically with email, and more to the point emails you receive from trusted sources that contain questionable material and links.

When a user gets hacked or compromised as a result of a phishing scheme, the people involved will use the users contacts list to send out emails in hopes of getting more users to give up their usernames and passwords.

Phishing: not the hook you're looking for

This post is a follow-up, of sorts, to the previous "Twitter spam" post. In making the slide deck about Twitter spam I realized there were a few different variations of spam in general, especially within emails.

This post deals specifically with "phishing"

Another post will address email arriving from trusted sources but smelling particularly spammy due to phishing...

If Twitter has it's moments of Costco-sized spam deliveries than email is the place where Costco shops. 

A lot of email spam originates as "phishing" scams. These are emails designed to get the user to voluntarily offer up their username and password. These emails convince the recipient they need to pride details, or log in, to prevent something bad from happening. Once the user replies or logs in the scammers have their passwords and can use their accounts to send out spam to a users address book.

I created this quick tutorial for my colleagues to help them recognize and identify phishing scams:

Know your Twitter spam

Periodically I try to create & post resources that I hope the entire PS 10 community; students, staff, and parents alike, find valuable. This is one of those posts. Spam comes in many forms but since we use Twitter so extensively here at PS 10 I wanted to create a Twitter-specific resources for recognizing and protecting yourself from Twitter-related spam.

Twitter has it's moments of Costco-sized spam deliveries.

We've all seen it. Or more to the point you got a Direct Message (DM) saying "wow, have you seen this post about you?" with a on-so-not-suspicious link attached. Or the ego enhancing "I've lost weight with this, and you could too!"

When this spam comes through I immediately delete it and let the sender know they most likely have been compromised. It's not always the users fault, though. Recently Pinterest was compromised and was sending out tweets to those users who had connected their Pinterest and Twitter accounts.

I created this quick tutorial for the PS 10 community to help everyone recognize and identify suspicious DMs and tweets: