Matt Thomas - 2010

Screen Capture easily with Quicktime X Sometimes you want to be able to capture what is happening on screen quickly and easily. The new Quicktime X that comes bundled with Snow Leopard allows you to do that by opening Quicktime Player and selecting File --> New Screen Recording. This is really great for sharing a particular skill you want students to be able to do so the can refer back to it without needing to interrupt, and also great for grabbing video and flash animations from the web. Files are saved as quicktime movies and are saved onto your hard drive. Here a movie to explain it --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NSydKTCNx0&feature=related

Move Files Quickly and Easily with File SharingTurn on File Sharing (System Preferences --> Sharing --> File Sharing) on the computers in your network so that you can quickly and easily share files across multiple machines. I use this all the time to put stuff on and grab work off classroom iMacs, and we even transfer large amounts of iMovie data across our school network to movie filming from our Media Centre to our classroom computers. To make it easier for your students to give you their work, setup an alias (shortcut) to a public dropbox on your laptop from the classroom computers. A better explanation here --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUThAcIBWfQ&feature=related

Use DropBox!

OK, this isn't really a Mac thing, but it is genius for transferring data between your iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad! Or even just between a bunch of computers within a cluster of schools. Travel over to http://www.dropbox.com and set it up on your machine now. It gives you 2GB of online storage and syncs everything up to the web so you can grab the files and share them from anywhere. More here --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_11nTLKbKfQ&feature=channel

Make Pretty IconsEveryone loves to personalise their Mac, and a great way to do that is to create your own icons for folders or files. You can do this by copying (Command 'C') a selected image in Preview and then opening up the info window of a file (File --> Get Info), selecting the icon in that window (it will have a blue outline around it when it is selected) and pasting that image (Command 'V') in. If you want to do an even better job, grab a free tool such as 'img2icns' that creates proper icns files that can be pasted in the same way. http://www.img2icnsapp.com/

Use Font BookFont Book is part of the built in applications on your Mac. I often use a small set of fonts that have all of the correct letter formations to use with my students. Rather than trying to remember which are the best fonts to use and search for them in the font bar in every application, it is much easier to setup a collection of fonts using Font Book. So for instance in my Font Book I have the following collections (groupings) of fonts --> 70s, Dr Seuss, Fun, MADE Awards, Outlines, Pirates and School. I find this to be a great time saver. The video walks you through the whole process really well --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpA_Fr4jz7A Now you can go crazy downloading new fonts at 1001 Free Fonts!

Save Time With Running RecordsOK, this is blatant self promotion, but also one of my favourite time savers! I always get stuck on trying to figure out error rates, percentage rates and self-correction rates when I'm taking running records with my students. I want to know real fast exactly where they are at. So I created the Running Record Checker Thingy which does just that. there is also an iPhone / iPod Touch version which you can find the iTunes link to here. This has saved me hours of trying to figure out the where my kids are at using a calculator and a slide rule. Of course, the important part of a running record is the analysis, and this won't do that for you!