School
All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin
Using a blog for teachers and students
In January 2005, I wrote “Why teachers should blog“. I still think that stands.
My good friend, Andy, has been teaching now for four years. Two years ago, he wanted a website for students to refer to. Instead of manually creating webpages from Dreamweaver, I got him to use WordPress and he’s been using it ever since. In fact, I’ll be wiping it out and updating it to the latest version since the new school year started today.
Since Andy started the class site, he doesn’t upload photos to the server. I got him hooked on Flickr, and he now has a Pro account for both the class and himself; he just links to the photos. (An alternative to Flickr is Zooomr; notice the three o’s, not two.) He also bought his own domain name, so he’s not using a subdomain from me. (I’ll link to his new site once I update WordPress.)
If that sounds too scary, there’s also WordPress.com. You don’t need a webhost to set one up, and it’s free. (Cons: You can’t install your own themes or plugins.)
Aside from the blog, I suggest having a few pages that have links to good learning resources, MLA reference, etc. Andy has a contact page, upcoming events, and reading minutes for each student.
If you do install your own blog, look for WordPress plugins that’ll help protect and enhance your it. For starters:
Oh yeah, know your audience. If the majority of your parents and students use dialup, use a minimalistic theme and keep the images small to speed up loading time. (Enough said.)
For support, WordPress has their own forums. If you’d like to hire me, let me know! I feel I know enough to get by pretty well. However, FreshlyPressed has a solid group of people that might interest you if you want a more professional route. (Perhaps I should ask if I can join them?)
If you have a blog for your class, please link to them in the comments so others can see some examples and gather ideas. Thanks, and happy blogging!
Related articles elsewhere on the web:
Update: Andy’s site has been up - I just forgot to update this post. See mrandychang.com. It uses K2, which I’m liking a lot.
How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity
Update 4/18/2007: This post is outdated. Audacity 1.3.2 (Beta) changes the method a bit, which I describe here.
Over a month ago, Lifehacker linked to an article: “Speeding Up Podcasts and Audio Books“. Here are the two sentences that caught my eye:
It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content.
However:
It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).
I have a 3G iPod, so I don’t have this feature. The article mentioned Amazing Slow Downer, but it’s not free. Fortunately, Matt commented about Audacity:
Audacity is great for this, at an unbeatable price ($0). [..] It is cross platform, open source (free), and [speeds] up audio excellently, [in addition to] being a general purpose audio editor. There was a beta of the next version last time I checked that allowed bulk conversion. Unfortunately no command-line. (Effect [menu] > Change Tempo is the command you want.)
So, if I want to speed up podcasts, I have to do some work. Except for the tempo increase, it won’t be automatic.
What to do about long lectures
I had class last night, which I basically look forward to every week. (For the most part, he’s a good professor.) Anyway, for the first 30 minutes of class, things were fine. Then, one guy came in that tends to ask too many irrelevant questions. He rubbed off on a few people, so they weren’t hindered from doing the same thing. I think in the course of the evening, 30 minutes of the 2 1/2 hours in class was solid material.
Being annoyed, I took my homework out and worked on problems relevant to the course. I was able to get some of it done, so at least I accomplished something in class.
During our break, I heard from the more talkatve people in the class that they love how they can talk about whatever and he’ll answer them. This definitely doesn’t help the classmates that can care less about discussing random stuff, but rather the material from the book. So, do any of you have suggestions how to keep class moving more smoothly? I’m feeling timid to say anything in class, and I’d hate to offend the professor.
Nebraska professor uses iPod for lectures
Psychology students and fans of Apple’s popular iPod can now listen and learn at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Calvin Garbin is one of the first instructors at the university to harness iPod’s versatility and use it as an educational tool. (Full story)
After reading this, I’m really excited that this professor gets it. Isn’t it worth the extra time to help the auditory learners? For me, I wouldn’t skip class, but instead use the recordings to listen to it again, in case I might’ve missed something.
Edit: I should elaborate. The “getting it” part is sort of against professors that don’t allow people to record their lectures. Personally, I think this hurts the majority of students who are trustworthy. It’s the 2% of dishonest students that mess it up for everyone else, and I don’t even know what that means! 
Summer winds down
Other than checking email, I’ve basically been off the computer for the past few days. I’ve been working all summer, and now that my boss at work is back from his vacation, I’m sort of on my own vacation. I didn’t go anywhere, but I’m just relaxing at home (and with friends). Once everything gets back in full swing, I won’t have too much free time to myself. (more…)
Too busy?
Last semester, things weren’t too hectic. I didn’t take too many classes, and I wasn’t working. Also, I wasn’t getting too many requests for the expertise I have to offer: building and troubleshooting PCs.
I’m back
Sorry for the post delay. On with it…
It seems like its been awhile since I’ve posted. Do I appear to post regularly?
I was going back and forth from procrastinating to study for my last final (for Accounting 101) and actually studying. Looking back on this last week, I’m somewhat unsure what I did exactly before Friday.
Verizon Wireless revamped GetItNow
I’m posting this because I know a lot of friends and myself travel to school through freeway or a number of streets. Luckily, a lot of us also use Verizon Wireless (I love IN-Network minutes). Now, with their site redesigned, it seems they’ve launched some new services that I can’t remember seeing before. The one that stands out is Traffic Alerts, where you can customize your routes to notify you of any problems only when you’re going to work/school, or going back home. It won’t alert you when you’re not even going to head out there.
Technically, I haven’t had a chance to try it out, but we’ll see how it goes if something does happen to come up.
Head over to their GetItNow website and getGoing with Traffic Alerts.
Oh yeah, for the sponaneous trips you end up taking, SigAlert does the job (for California). They’ve redone their site also, and it’s looking pretty good if you ask me.
Messing with WP
I’m not just thinking about the site redux, I’m starting to try stuff out.
After this morning’s tough accounting exam, I came home wanting to not think about school. So, I dove right in hoping to accomplish something:
- simplify the navigational side bar
- get the static pages to look just like the rest of the site
There are some quirks I have to work though, such as getting this layout valid again, and figure out why there’s an extra bullet on the links page. I have a very basic gist of how to try this again, so I’m going to give it another shot later this evening. I’d like to be able to use Kubrick with a horizontal navigation menu, kinda like how Michael Heilemann has his setup. If I can’t, it’s totally cool.
Or, I might revert back to a non-Kubrick type layout, where the template isn’t so . . . complex (at least for me).
By the way, I don’t have to buy the domain name “All Narfed Up”. But then again, it is available! I’ll explain the cool name when I make that about page I’ve been aiming to do sometime.
One more thing: I got around to updating the forums to 1.3.1. It wasn’t even that many files to upload. In any case, it looks fine now - let’s hope it doesn’t get hacked!
I procrastinate too much
I got a bunch of stuff coming up next week for all of my classes: two exams and a poem to be memorized. I’m not even close to being prepared. So, I came home after my two classes for today and stumbled onto this site properly named Study Guides and Strategies. I really need to create some good habits now or it’ll just keep getting worse and worse. Possibly, it might pass onto my children if I don’t sow good seeds now. Just something to think about…
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