MouseFlip Blog

As you may know I have a YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/mouseflip, where I post lessons from when I teach students in class. The obvious reasons I post them is for students who miss class or need to review them again. So far I'm almost at 200 videos and over 40,000 views. A little intimidating when I step back and think about how many people that really is and I have no idea who is watching. Although, it encourages me to read this message I received from one of those 40,000 viewers while my website was under maintenance.

-I use the alarm to wake me up at 5am on Wed and Fri with a siren to play basketball; all other days I wake up to a soft harp beckoning me at 6:15am.

-On the bus to school I read Proverbs or listen to a Francis Chan podcast.

-While we play basketball I play a mix I put together in iTunes or we jam to my radio station back in Hawaii.

-At teacher meetings I use Awesome Note to take notes which is automatically synced with my Google Docs and I add appointment reminders to my calendar to keep me organized. If I am given a handout, I snap a picture of it and PDFreader converts it into a nice PDF to read...I then recycle.

-As I start teaching class and use it to control the mouse to my computer with AirMouse

-In class we use Twitter and I use it to tweet what we are learning

-During break I'm tempted to play Angry Birds but I resist and check my RSS Feeds to stay updated on the latest technology.

-After school if I'm coaching, I use it to view the stats from the last game or to draw up new plays to run.

-After I'll check to see if my Dallas Mavericks won that day and how my fantasy football team is looking and make any lineup changes.

-If I walk to the bus stop or Itaewon to eat, I'll snap some photos on my way and upload them directly to Facebook. While riding the bus I'll read a book with the Kindle app or watch my favorite TV show.

-When I get home Mika usually steals it and plays with all sorts of apps for children that I loaded on there for her.

Diagram by Dr. Helen Barrett

On the first day of school, teachers usually pass out and go over the course syllabus. Therefore, after the classroom environment and the appearance of the teacher, the syllabus is one of the first impressions that students use to formulate their first impressions of the class. Of course we spend time making our classroom (or computer lab in my case) look professional as well as our personal appearace but how often do we spend time making our syllabus look good? Students don't want to just see pages of text about the class...they want to see visual representations to assist the test. Therefore, this year I spent extra time on my four page syllabus which I sent to them and had them print out and bring to class. Most printed in color which saved my printing cost.