Tony DePrato | Follow Me on LinkedIn
More videos from my channel on EdTech Mastery.
Integrate Technology Effectively
Corona virus is disrupting how the whole teaching and learning process happens. When it hit the US back in early 2020 it sent a lot of schools spinning to figure out how to successfully implement distance learning and what tools would be needed. One tool that our teachers wanted or found very useful was a document camera. Our school was rocking an old Elmo TT-02RX document camera.
This document camera is a tank. It is very durable, tough, and it works fine . . . as long as you are in the classroom.
Here are problems our teachers ran into with these Elmos at home. They are large. They can easily dominate a desk or kitchen table. Carting them from school and then back again isn’t the easiest task. The built in camera is less than 2 megapixels which is OK but far from great especially now that even Chromebooks have HD displays. Finally the software is bad. It works, but it is not easy to get around and looks horrible and getting it on computers also was a pain.
This particular model we have is almost ten years old so looking for a replacement was a priority. At first I looked at Elmo for an updated model of what we currently have. They had it but . . .
That is a lot of money. In fact that is nearly as much as our teacher’s MacBook Air just to put that in perspective.
Now Elmo does have some more affordable options that looked good but there was a problem with those as well. A lot of schools were looking for document cameras as well and they were sold out.
So finding document cameras over the summer was a challenge. After some research I found a company called IPEVO out of Taiwan. They make a number of document cameras and within our budget. We had purchased one before and it worked out fine and they had stock which was something else important to us 🙂
So we landed on the IPEVO VZ-X – and it was on sale for $260 US dollars. Now it retails for $299.
So let’s break it down.
Overall, this is a solid document camera. It does what it needs to do and nothing more. I like having a device that only does what it is designed to do and does it well. This is one of those devices. What document cameras are you using in your school and how do they fair? Leave those in the comments below!
Microsoft Teams Better Meeting Management with Attendee Mode # #microsoftteams #o365 #onlinelearning
By Tony DePrato | Follow Me on LinkedIn
This video explains how to set up your Apple hardware to stream audio from Youtube and other sources to your Teams Meeting.
Get Soundflower: https://github.com/mattingalls/Soundflower/releases/tag/2.0b2
Let me lay out a scenario and see if you can relate to it. You have found a great YouTube video (like the one below :)). You want to show it to your class. It has a great explanation, it simplifies it and since it is on YouTube you can reference it over and over again so you can link to it in your LMS of choice or share it out another way.
The big day comes and man you are stoked. You bring up the link and … OMG! There are rude and inappropriate comments in the link below.
Note – these comments are not rude in anyway. I am just making a point.
Your students are snickering. You’re freaking out because you are afraid that these students will go home and tell their parents. Then you’re afraid those parents will tell your principal and before you know it you’ll be unemployed.
Well there is a solution out there friendly visitor. There is viewpure. This very simple website (no sign up needed or even AVAILABLE) will take the YouTube video you want and “Purify” it.
Just copy the URL (or web address) of the YouTube video.
Then paste it into viewpure’s box for the YouTube video like shown below.
Finally click the Purify button and whamo! The video with no salty or inappropriate comments.
Now that the video has been Purified you can actually take that link and share it out and that is the version of the video that students or parents will see.
Now this is pretty useful but there is much more you can do. If you click on the little gear at the bottom of the video you will see a number of other options.
You can give it a custom URL add a password to it and even trim it down. Let’s say you find an interview that is an hour long and you only need 5 minutes. viewpure will can do this as well! Very handy.
There is still one more trick that viewpure has to offer. You can actually search for other videos that have been Purified. Instead of putting in a YouTube URL just type the topic in the box instead and hit the Purify button.
You will get a bunch of results but please watch them before showing them to your class.
That’s viewpure.
Recently I posted about Google Sheets and how awesome the query function is. I thought it was so cool that I would make a little video about how to do it, in case my instructions were not super clear. Watch it below and leave comments about how you would use the query function in your classroom or school.