From supplementing traditional instructor-led courses, to streaming complete
courses to distance learners, to recruiting students or fundraising, Microsoft
Windows Media 9® is the best platform for creating live and on-demand digital
media content. And with Microsoft® Producer, creating rich media content for
the classroom is even easier.

Microsoft's digital media gives schools the ability to improve the student experience through higher quality audio and video delivered with lower bandwidth requirements that still works on older equipment.                           

Here are just a few of the benefits with Windows Media 9 Series: Professional-
level encoding modes enable high definition (HD) video quality and multichannel sound.                                                                                       
                                                                                                           

Other innovations include improved capability for combined voice and music
content (such as radio, advertising, or voiceovers) and an improved screen
capture mode that enables top quality at very low data rates.  This would
allow the teacher, students, or school to produce video and audio that nears
professional quality with voice-overs for commentary and with dubbing to
remove or correct inappropriate audio.

In addition to a 20 percent compression boost for streaming audio, WMA 9
includes new support for Variable Bit Rate (VBR) audio to produce the highest
fidelity at the lowest data rate. This allows the school and students to
useless than state-of-the-art equipment and still be able to use these and
other audio and video innovations.

For more information:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

Qwizdom UK

Qwizdom UK is an interactive remote response system that lets you communicate with your classroom. Each student is given a remote.  The teacher or presenter than asks a question.  The students then respond immediately using the remotes. The response is immediately sent to the computer and recorded.  The computer will than register live feedback.  Using Qwizdom you can create presentations, quizzes, games, and surveys.  They also have pre-made curriculum materials for every content area. 

Interactive whiteboards are wonderful tools to enhance instruction. A
Smartboard is a whiteboard or an information board with digital interactive
technology. Information can be displayed; you can write on the board as well
as load information from other sources onto it for display…With smart board
interactive whiteboards you can integrate digital information into teaching,
presenting, and brainstorming. As an educator you can improve learning and
meeting effectiveness by enhancing communication and stimulating audience
engagement, it can save you time, effort and resources. You can write notes,
make diagrams, set up links to websites, and save your work for future uses.

Smartboards assist the teacher as they allow one to choose from hundreds of
pre-formulated interactive lesson plans with extra images, outlines, and helps
available to make the teaching process easier and the classroom experience
more interesting and more interactive for the students, thus improving
participation and retention. Smartboards have a provided list of websites
available for teachers.

Smartboards allow themselves to be used both inside and outside the classroom,
enabling the teacher to interact with students at home, and allowing the
students to interact with each other, as well as with online resources
available in the moment, as students are working alone or in study groups.
The in out of class and solo group options will increase flexibility, as
students can find the style of use that best enables their learning style.
This will hopefully increase student interest and student effectiveness.

For more information:

http://www.smarttech.com/

How Smart Board can impact Education

http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-us/

TriFIT 

     This summer I will be working for the Wellness Department at the University of Findlay. One of my duties is to become proficent in the TriFIT and help conduct a workshop for all the professors and the community. The TriFIT is computer that can measure and compute fitness assessments. You can provide personalized fitness reports and create customized exercise and nutrition programs. The TriFIT can measure body weight, strength, flexibility and body composition. The TriFIT also provides students with a complete printout of the areas tested. Being a physical education teacher, this would be increadibly useful to me. One can measure 4 areas of fitness in 15 minutes, which would normally have taken 4 class periods. It also gives you the norms for age levels, areas to work on, and ways to work on those areas. I haven't foun much chance to work with the TriFIT yet, but I look forward to it. With the research I have done, I have found that that there are a few high schools starting to use this equipment, includingsome in the Chicagoland area. If any of you are interested the TriFIT, is kept in the cardio center at the FRC. I am unsure if it is available to all students. But you should really check it out it's pretty impressive.
For more information about the TriFIT:
http://www.polarusa.com/healthclubs/healthclubs/trifit/models/trifit600.asp

     Screen it is a website that screens movies, videos, dvds, and music. I believe it would be very useful in the classroom. In health class I like to show movies that incorporate the topics being covered. Screen it gives a very detailed description of almost every movie possible. It includes as the number of swear words used, sexual content, and violence; and it tells you at what point in the movie they occur, to enable you to skip over that offending section in your presentation to your class. I believe it could be a good tool for parents also, so they can watch very closely the movies and music influencing their children . For more information:

http://www.screenit.com/search_movies.html"

The Learning Essentials Student Edition

     The Learning Essentials Student Edition gives students outlines/templates
for reports and papers and for presentations. It provides organizational tools
and helps for applications to college.  It has helps for team and club
organizations, grade trackers, prom and party planners, and helps for
creating, updating, and improving resumes, all of which are a great blessing
to students.

The Learning Essentials Educators Edition

     The Learning Essentials Educators Edition offers educators lesson plan templates, 10 minute lesson ideas, Power-point presentation templates, worksheet templates, and test/quiz templates.  It tutors educators on how to create your own handouts, worksheets, charts and diagram templates, and student award templates.  It offers templates for rubrics and grade books; it also helps with administrative tasks.  It offers forms and organizers for field trips, banners, events, and signs.  It assists by offering a template for newsletters, bulletins, and memos.

For more info, see:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d7097be8-91c7-4171-859c-8fa4114765be&displaylang=en

or:http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/education/learningessentials/Learning_Essentials_Fact_Sheet_UK.doc

                                                                        Recently our school purchased Microsoft Student 2006. This is a new and helpful technological aid to assist in the teaching of health, fitness, and conditioning. Using it, students can create power points, projects, and format and design documents. For example, in the area of English and Communications it tells the students how to do a book report, oral presentations, research projects, and journals. It offers the student the helpful use of a dictionary, thesaurus, quotations, book summaries, drama asummaries, and poetry. In the area of math it offers the student a graphing calculator, chart makers, and measurement conversions. In the area of social studies and history it offers just about anything a student could desire to assist in looking up information for projects, reports, journals, or presentations. Included in this would time lines, statistics and statistical tables, videos and brief video clips, and maps. For each topic or area, it gives homework how-to's to help the student turn out a better effort.      I have used Microsoft Office for video clips of sports when I did a baseball history with my advanced PE class. I showed a video clip of Henry Aaron breaking the home run record. I have also used it for articles and current health topics.                 

      This software has some great advantages that recommend its use. This software is free to schools.  There is a student version and a educators version.  It has been very helpful to myself and my students check it out. For more information: http://www.microsoft.com/student/default.mspx  

     I was first introduced to Edline in a staff meeting, when we were told we would be using the service next fall. Edline is a way to communicate with parents, students, and staff. It is basically a teachers gradebook online. As a teacher I will be able to post assignments, class schedules, and grades on the internet for students and parents to see at any time. As a teacher, this is very exciting and will make the students more responible for their grades, not to mention that the parents can be informed at all times on their sons or daughters school work. Also, as a coach I can create a site for basketball, which can keep the parents informed on directions, practice times, and game times. There are many other features I have not yet learned about, but I am very excited to get to use it, and I am confident it will be very helpful.
For more information: http://www.edline.com/

      A relatively new technology which makes audio, text, and video portable and transferable is called iPod. It can offer a lot to the classroom. It can help students hear and see information. It can relay assignments, information, and schedules easily. It can give them, by way of video, clips of proper techniques for sports or fitness activities; it can report to them their progress and needed areas of improvement. iPod can bring much to the classroom as a portable learning tool, allowing anywhere, anytime access to speeches, audiobooks, and lectures. Photos and podcastscan expand teaching possibilities, and video can be added to enrich the experience even further. The opportunities are endless for teachers to seamlessly create, organize, distribute, and access all kinds of learning materials.     

     With iTunes, students can create slideshows, soundtracks, and movie projects using iPhoto, iMovie HD, and QuickTime, organize and store them using iTunes, and access them or present them anywhere. And iPod can connect to a TV, video projector, or display using optional cables and present student work to an entire classroom. Digital photos make science experiments, social studies assignments, and journalism projects come to life. Yearbook and drama clubs rely on photography, too. One can transfer thousands of photos to an iPod or iPod nano from iPhoto. Plus, upload photos directly from a camera to iPod using the optional iPod Camera Connector. A student or educator can transfer text-based information to an iPod and read it onscreen. With the notes reader, news articles, classroom notes, even flash cards for spelling tests can be right at hand. One can even link audio files and notes files for enhanced audio/visual learning, and podcasts allow students to subscribe to text, audio, and video curriculum materials right out of iTunes. This technology can improve the classroom regimen and organization. A student can keep track of their schedule and classmates with iPod it supports Address Book on the Mac and Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC, as well as industry-standard vCalendar and vCard files for Entourage and Palm Desktop syncing. So creative excuses are replaced by creative homework. The dog need no longer eat the homework. Loading files, photos, notes, and songs onto an iPod is relatively easy. For more info see: http://www.apple.com/education/ipod/ Or: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/17607