Category Archives: blogs

A free online scheduling tool

As a former school secretary, I always needed to schedule meetings for my directors. We used Google as a school system. However, when you need to schedule a meeting for 15 people or more, how to manage it efficiently? Also, currently during the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have lockdown, others limit their borders. How do we synchronize our time to meet each other in different time zones?  It is certainly a challenge, but I found a smart tool which can save our lives! Let’s schedule a meeting with Doodle

 

  1. Go to Doodle
  2.   Set up your available time
  3. Invite participants
  4. Allow participants to choose their available time.
    Super simple, convenient, and efficient and……..most importantly, it is free!

Issues of screen time again

As I posted earlier about ‘screen time’, as technology advances, researchers pay more attention to technology, play, and learning. In the process of child development, play time is essential. It not only opens up an opportunity for children to explore the world but also stimulates children’s curiosity and creativity. It is definitely beneficial to children’s brain development. However, there is a tendency that when kids are noisy, parents use digital devices to direct children’s attention, which is, ‘babysit children with the technology’. Then when young children have not yet developed their self-control, screens can occupy, distract, and entertain children for sure.

Thus, it is detrimental for both sides: for the child, learning to look outside of oneself for happiness or distraction in tough times; for parents, learning to rely on screens instead of our own ingenuity to soothe and occupy kids. It deprives the interaction between parents and children. It also destroys the explore opportunity for both children and parents. Moreover, it is not a good parenting skill certainly. It just kills children’s time and wastes the cherished moment getting along with parents.

Therefore, how might time on screens affect relationships? In my opinion, before children developed self-regulation skills, stop babysit them with screen time. Kids have no choice nor perception to self control. 

Reference: Beware the quick tech fix when….

3 steps to remove Ads from videos

Have you ever worried about inappropriate advertisements always popped up at the beginning of a video? I encountered the same problem when I played a video in the student assembly. All the kids were watching the Ads and laughing which distracted the main focus. At that moment, I was so embarrassed.

Now, I’d like to share a simple way to remove Ads from videos!

  1. Go to safeshare
  2. Upload your video. Choose the appropriate category. Copy and paste the link.
  3. Share your end product

A cool video editing website

Have you ever felt perplexed about how to edit video clips? Have you wondered how to make the connection between the objectives and assessments?

Here’s a cool website for trimming video and adding checkpoints in it. In other words, this website allows you to edit your videos and add multiple questions, open-ended questions, and graphic/written notes within the video. Also, the total length of the video stays the same. Now, let’s take a look!

  1. Go to edpuzzle
  2. Upload your video
  3. Start editing the video. No worries! The website is intuitive. You can cut, voiceover, and/or adding questions.
  4. This is what it looks like when the question pops up.
  5. After editing, copy and paste the link or embed it to your website.
  6. The end product looks just perfect. It is just a normal video with questions as checkpoints.Take a try! You will experience how fantastic it is! 

Know nothing about Coding? simple ways to embed online videos and edit

During the COVID pandemic, online teaching or blended teaching has become a ‘new normal’. Thus, as a teacher, how do I utilize technology to assist teaching? Are you worried about no basic skills or coding experience? No worries! Tech geek will share some useful tips with you.

As aI am taking a class called Advanced Elementary Educational Trends, we have learned many cool, simple ways to tackle difficult problems such as embedding online videos, trim videos with ads, add annotations to videos, and create stop points to ask questions. Take embedding for example, you don’t have to learn how to code, all you have to know is HOW TO USE TECHNOLOGY.

Step1: go to your video> share

Step 2:

Instead of posting a picture and insert a link to it, the shortcut is click embedding.

Step3: copy the code>paste to your text> Done : )

Wanna know more useful tips about editing videos, please check out here.