You can teach an “old dog new tricks”. Compared to many of my colleagues, I would be considered an “old dog”… 30+ years of doing this. I learn “new tricks” daily, often from colleagues halfway across the country (thank you Coach Grabowski)
This will be a quick post listing a few of what I consider essential “new tricks” that I use daily in my coaching and teaching. Some of these are apps, while others are computer (Mac Book Pro) programs.
Grab
Grab is a resident program on Macs and allows you to grab an image of your entire screen
or a portion.
It comes in handy when capturing telestrated images from Hudl, or individual frames from any video. It is extremely easy to use…. very intuitive… and places the image on your clipboard where it can be quickly pasted or exported to another program. There is an explanation of how to do this on a PC at this link: How to take a screenshot in Microsoft Windows, but I am not sure if this is the only or easiest way to do it on a PC.
QuickTime Player
This, too, is a resident program on Macs. It allows you to make a screen recording, also known as a screencast (see post, Making a Screen Recording), of anything that is on your computer screen. It could be a recording of a telestrated Hudl video that you want to imbed in a PowerPoint presentation, or a recording of an animated PowerPoint presentation that you want to put on YouTube. Whatever action takes place on your screen after beginning a Screen Recording (using QuickTime Player) will be recorded in a video that can be saved, embedded, used in other programs, or sent to the web.
As with Grab, you can record your entire screen
or a portion.
I have learned as much the past 6 months following some excellent coaches on Twitter as I have the previous 6 years. It is a daily virtual clinic! You can easily connect with coaches, who have varied expertise, to virtually and electronically pick their brains. I have coaches and teachers who I follow that deliver daily motivational inspirations (@TonyCourville), challenge me to improve my coaching methods (@CoachKGrabowski), and deliver the latest ideas involving technology and education(@linsgc). Most blogging coaches will tweet their latest post, so it becomes easy to scroll through the tweets to find the “meat”
Excel
Excel is part of the Microsoft Office suite of programs that is resident on most PC’s, and available for Mac as well. All of my strength and conditioning weight workouts are Excel workbooks.
I manage workouts for over 300 athletes using the program on these workbooks. You can read about the workout on my blog, at this post, A Weekly (not weakly!) Workout, and can download the Excel workbook templates here:
About anything that I do with numbers (other than stats and grades… I have separate programs for those) I do on Excel.
Socrative
And this week I will be taking my own advice (see post The Time is Now) and learning how to use the app, Socrative. Socrative is a smart student response system that allows teachers to engage their classrooms via their own devices… smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Coach Grabowski has an excellent post describing how to use the system to make your position group meetings more interactive at this link: Another app for interactive position meetings.
Good luck to you all as you head into a new season… and remember…
We Can Do More… our brain is lying to us… Don’t Believe It!
We Can Learn New Tricks!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com
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