Okay, disaster almost struck yesterday.  I had an open (refillable) bottle of water on my desk at school yesterday when the phone rang.  I run across the room to get it (school doesn’t start until Tuesday for us, so no learners in the room) and I bump my desk.

Can you see where this is going?  Laptop open on desk, turned on, water on desk, …. yup.  Water in laptop.  Fbomb dropped.  Thank goodness no kids in the room.

And guess what, the last time I backed up was in June.  I have done so much work over the summer on my laptop, and I almost lost all of it.  And I HAVE a good backup strategy.  I use SyncBack every week to backup my laptop to an external hard drive.

At school, I use it daily to backup my networked H drive, my desktop folder where I save all docs to, and my active flash drive to a 2 gig flash drive.  This software has options to do all of this automatically, with no input from me what so ever.  At 3:15, every day, all of my files at school are automatically backed up.

My laptop, however is manual.

Guess where my system failed?  I was not at school every week, so I stopped the manual backup of my laptop on the weekend. That is one of the big dark secrets of being a plugged in teacher. If WE don’t actively back up our files, we can lose everything in the blink of an eye.

I recommend Syncback.  It is easy, fast, and fairly idiot proof.  But, you have to use it. 

A couple of topics in this posting.

First off, here is a link to a site that has collected 100 videos for use in the classroom.  Not all of these are for learners, some are for teachers, but still, there are some really great videos here.

Secondly, in the comments to Dan’s post on videos (found here) there are some comments from other teachers like Jackie, Dina and Todd that we need some repository for all these lists.  We need a way to collectively work together and share the video love.

This is really hard to do.  We are all busy, we are all trying to keep up with our learners who are pushing us every day to do better.

Scott Mcleod at Dangerously Irrelevant, however, already has a wiki called Moving Forward set up and running that has a lot of this kind of content.  More importantly, he put out a call for MORE content.

Wow, kind of serendipitous that within 2 weeks all these things came together.  I posted over at Dangerously Irrelevant the links to Jackie’s, Todd’s, and my list of videos.  I think it is really up to Scott to respond on his blog and let us know if he wishes his wiki to act as such a consolidator.   I just posted my list to his “Videos and Handouts” page though.

So, Scott.  What say you?

Okay, Dan issued a challenge, and since I have spent some time this summer working on just this topic, I thought I would contribute.  I have several different categories.  Statistics, “Gateway”, Physics, Algebra, and DYAV & Personal Development.  Some of these fall under more than one category, but I will only list them in one here. 

I have most of these videos downloaded to iTunes and on my iPod.  On my iPod they are sorted via playlists so I can find them easily.  Connect the iPod component AV cable to my pod, and push play and my class is watching the video over my projector.

I am always looking for new videos, so this is not a complete list.  It is current only through today.

It is a long list, so click for the whole thing.

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