3rd time's a charm—Communication class sells their inventions yet again!

Once again, Communication class students took over assembly this last Friday to present their inventions they created and to sell them to TAPA students! If you missed them, take a look at them here:

Jass	Judy
Joyce	Antoine
Jason Y.

If you haven't had the chance to vote for the students yet, there's still time! Go for it!

Future SA officers face the fear with Assembly campaign speeches

Today. at Assembly, students who've declared an interest in running for next year's Student Association (SA) presented persuasive speeches, imploring their peers to vote for them. I'm proud to have taught 5 of 6 of them in my past Communications classes, and they did me proud! Here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

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President	Jessica C.
Executive VP	Rachel
Social VP	Robert	Betty
Treasurer	Jessica L.
Comm Director	Antoine

Take a side and persuade me you're right!

Originally posted 11/30/11.

Which of these persuasive speech topics interests you? Today for class,

Pick	3	of the following topics
Write	x2	paragraphs (1 for, 1 against) for each
Total of	6	paragraphs.

Post the six paragraphs to your blog.

Posted with Blogsy

Missed the Lunch with Communications Class series? Enjoy them at your own leisure.

This week, Communications Class did its second third fourth fifth (!) ever Lunch with Communications Class speeches, presenting 8 different Demonstration speeches by 8 different speakers. In case you didn't get a chance to check out these awesome speeches, here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

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Jass	Enoch
Antoine	Judy
Jason	Joyce
Annika	Ivy

From directions to demos: Writing in-depth instructions

Originally posted 1/30/12.

Communication Students: Here's your assignment we talked about today. You are to write specific ingredients, steps, and any alternatives or further customizations for each section. Again, remember—you need every single step and incredibly specific ingredients. No slacking—I'll be grading hard!

Ingredients:

• Sliced bread (2 pieces)
• Peanut butter (2 tablespoons)
• Jelly (1.5 tablespoons)
• Butter Knife (for putting PB onto bread)
• Spoon (for putting Jelly onto bread)

Steps:

1. Put peanut butter onto bread piece #1. Using the knife, smear 2 tablespoons of peanut butter onto one side of the bread. It's best to make sure that it's spread evenly across one side. When you are done, put that piece of bread aside.
2. Put jelly onto bread piece #2. Take a spoon full of jelly (approximately 1 to 1.5 tablespoons) and smear it onto one side of the bread. Again, make sure the jelly is spread evenly.
3. Put 'em together. Pick  up the peanut butter piece and put it, PB-side down, on top of the jelly piece (jelly-side up). At this point, I'd recommend you cut the sandwich in half to make it easier to eat.
4. Enjoy. Goes great with a tall, cold glass of milk.

Alternatives:

• Creamy or crunchy? Either type of peanut butter will work, and either type are delicious.
• Don't like jelly? Use honey or marshmallow fluff instead. 
• Toasting the bread is awesome because the warm bread will melt the peanut butter, but the jelly will stay pretty cool.
• Awesome people cut the bread diagonally; lame-os cut the sandwich in half from a square to two rectangles.
• Secret Webb Family Recipe: use three pieces of bread to make a double sandwich. (1) Smother two pieces of bread with jelly. (2) Fry the third piece of in a little bit of butter until it's really hot. (3) Cover both sides of the hot bread with peanut butter. (4) Arrange the sandwich as:
  
  • cold/regular bread
  • jelly
  • peanut butter (which is starting to melt)
  • hot, gooey bread
  • peanut butter (which is starting to melt)
  • jelly
  • cold/regular bread

Ok, so that's what I'm expecting. Seems a lot more in-depth than just "TEACH-AH, JUST PUT IT TOGETHA!" Now YOU make a blog post, just like I did, with all the information for your speech.

What are you going to present? Check out these Demo topics, Comm students!

Today in class, I asked Communications students to look over the following list of Demonstration speech topics and pick 5 that they would be the most interested in presenting.

Select 5 possible speech ideas you'd be interested in presenting and blog them (one short paragraph each). Of the 5 you select, only three of them may be from my list here, so make your own ideas! Go.

DEATH TO PPT. / Haiku Deck's superior, / and you'll see how.

I hate Powerpoints. They're ugly, they're redundant, and they're crippling to speakers. You could be the greatest speaker in the world, and when a Powerpoint appears behind you, you'll find a way to sneak peeks at the hideous monstrosity and be directed by its rigid bullet-infested format. That's the #1 reason I've not had Communications class students use presentation software as a part of their speeches—chances are, if they do, they'll simply read the main points off the screen and turn their minds off.

That's why I immediately fell in love with Haiku Deck—it's an iPad app that forces you to take all that bland, basic information and translate into its key points. With Hauku Deck, you're limited to how much information you can put on a slide, so a long, bullet-infested slide turns into a short phrase. It also features stunning images and really cool fonts, and it's super quick to put together a deck. Basically, it's the best presentation software I've seen for the iPad.

British Lit students will be using this on Monday and Tuesday to create a characteristics presentation, so take a peek at my sample (that took me <60 seconds to make) to figure out what I'm looking for.

About those Communications Invention speeches... Who won?

I never had the chance to announce the winners of your votes for the best Communication speeches done for assembly a few weeks ago. The results:

• Which presentation was the best? Belteshazzar (Jessica L.)
  
• Which speech was the most persuasive? Profunacklace (Jessica G.)
  
• Which product would you most want to purchase? iBowlholder (James)
  

Congrats to all the speakers for excellent jobs!

More Communication class inventions, please!

Once again, Communication class students took over assembly this last Friday to present their inventions they created and to sell them to TAPA students! If you missed them, take a look at them here:

Jessica L.	Gabriella
James (Part 1)	James (Part 2)
Lillian	Jessica G.

If you haven't had the chance to vote for the students yet, there's still time! Go for it!

"You know what they outta invent?" Persuade us to invest in your creation!

Originally posted 3/20/12.



Vince, the pitchman for such amazing products as the SlapChop and ShamWow, is quite the marketing genius. He takes simple products and pitches them in such a way that you feel stupid not buying them. I mean, I actually bought one of these SlapChops (admittedly, from IKEA, not from Vince, but still) because once he puts the idea in your head... it's stuck.

I could have been a millonaire.

When I was little, I used to want to be an inventor. I thought it would be so cool to come up with an idea for a simple product, put them together, and sell them to make a million dollars. I had the opportunity to try it in college with my awesome Nose Muff idea that I told you about in class, but not only was my idea not accepted, but it looks like someone beat me to the punch.

Well, for your Persuasive speech, you'll be doing what I once attempted: inventing a product and selling it to us, your audience. This speech will incorporate a little bit of the Demonstration speech skills you should have acquired, but your focus should be less on how to use the product and more on why we should buy this product. Next class, we'll be doing an auction over the junk that I showed you today in class. If you need a reminder of what I'll be "selling," take a look here:



After picking out your items, you'll put them together, build a mock product, create an advertisement, and write up an outline. The final project will be be pitching your product to the entire school at our assembly on November 2nd, so you've got to come up with the greatest invention idea ever! So be ready for Thursday's auction!

Why you stink at arguing: studying rhetorical fallacies to improve your persuasion skills

Originally posted 11/21/11.

Do you regularly get pwnd by your teacher or friends because you lack the basic persuasion and/or debate skills necessary for your success? In class today, I went over the following presentation:

Logical Fallacies on Prezi

As I said at the end of the presentation, you have one assignment: Go to  and find 3 videos that exemplify one fallacy from each of each of the categories of rhetorical fallacies

• Emotional fallacies [pathos]
• Ethical fallacies [ethos]
• Logical fallacies [logos]

Embed (not link to) each example into a blog post with 1¶ (each) explaining why it is an example of that fallacy.

Ok, so there's that! Good luck!

Before you turn in the any essay...

It's been a little while since I've posted on this blog, mostly because:

1. I've been crazy busy with making assignments, working on my Masters, and grading all you work.
2. I've been posing a lot more to the shared Evernote Notebook. (Subscribe here!)
3. We've been hammering away at "standard" reading, assignments, and other homework that doesn't require too much extra explanation.
4. I've been so slammed with things that I haven't been able to "play" with tech stuff and show you how to use it.

Hopefully, I'll get back onto posting on here again soon. However, until then, I've got a resource that all students, especially essay-writing British Literature kids, ought to take a look at. Before turning in a paper to any teacher (notably, myself), I'd take a peek at the following list (available for you to download here) and make sure you check everything off the list.

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1. Find and destroy the following:
• intensifiers / de-intensifiers (e.g really, pretty, maybe, mostly, nearly, barely)
• blah words (e.g good, bad) 
2. Check all your verbs:

• Are they all present? All past? 
• Are there any be verbs (i.e. am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being)? Kill as many as you can. 
• Did you write active sentences? Were passive sentences written by you? 
3. Recheck for sloppy errors:

• Are there any "red squiggly" errors? (e.g. teh, Mr. Web, alot) 
• Is the formatting up to the teacher's standards? (e.g. margins, font size/type, tabs, title, bibliography) 
• Did you reread your essay OUT LOUD? 
4. Take the "Ahhhhh" test:

• Is your reader going to be smarter/better-informed after reading this? 
• How long is your teacher going to say "Ahhhhh" after reading it? 

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I can't guarantee that going through every question will automatically earn you an A, but I can guarantee you that it'll help quite a bit. Take note!

Here's something I hate, and a way you can make sure I'm free of it

"A happy teacher grades you better than an unhappy teacher." ~Mr. Webb

Want to know something that annoys me? When I sit down to grade blogposts, read or watch your awesome work, come up with the score I'm going to give you... and then I see this:

That makes me unhappy. In fact, it really makes me angry. And, as you can probably see from the above quote, you don't want me to be angry.

So, interested in getting yourself a happier teacher? Of course you are:

1. Go to your Blogger.com page. Once you get there, go into the Settings for your blog for my class.
   
   
   
2. Change your Show Word Verification settings under Posts and Comments. Make sure you switch it to "No".
   
   
   
3. Save the changes. 

Easy, right? It's so easy, in fact, that I will ask that you change this setting immediately.  From now on, each time I have to fill out word verification on your blog, I will lower your final semester score by 10%!  NO FORGIVENESS ON THIS! So do it right now!

Missed the Lunch with Communications Class series? Enjoy them at your own leisure.

Last week, Communications Class did its second third fourth (!) ever Lunch with Communications Class speeches, presenting 6 different Demonstration speeches by 6 different speakers. In case you didn't get a chance to check out these awesome speeches, here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

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James	Jessica L.
Mark	Gabriella
Jessica G.	Lillian

You didn't think I'd let Communications class go without homework, did you?

In Communications class today, we watched a  talk by Jon Ronson about psychopaths. Here it is again, for your viewing pleasure:



Your assignments for the weekend are to:

• Write your in-depth instructions. (Should be done)
• Outline your speech.
• Practice for Tuesday's speeches.
• Make your 3  speeches.
• Write 3 (short) paragraphs about 3 things you learned from the Jon Ronson video. (Please embed the video by putting the following code into your post:
  

  <iframe width="400" height="225" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xYemnKEKx0c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

  and then write the paragraphs.

Demo topics, Demo topics, hot, fresh, and off the press!

Communications students got lucky that I forgot to post a list of possible Demonstration Speech topics after asking you to look at my list last class, but hey, better late than never. Here are some options for your speeches:



So, right off the bat, your first assignment is to select 5 possible speech ideas you'd be interested in presenting and blog them (one short paragraph each). Of the 5 you select, only three of them may be from my list here, so make your own ideas! Go.

How to build a speech in 6 easy steps

Originally posted 1/18/12.

Today in class, we went over the 6 steps to building a speech, but we didn't have a chance to go over the last 2 slides. Here's the slideshow, if you want to check it out:



Also, if you want to download this as a PDF for your iPad, this link will make it happen.

Praying for each of you, every day!

We talk about God a lot at TAPA, and I hope that students realize that this is because we all truly believe how powerful He is. We believe in Him so much, that, daily, we ask Him to come into our classes  help us all to learn, take care of us, and bless us. Whether you know it or not, every teacher at TAPA also prays for students, both in class and in our personal time. We want you to not only succeed in school, but to feel the awesome power that God brings into your lives.

In addition to praying for all of you, like I do every day, I'm adding in another prayer goal for myself: I want to pray for every student, specifically, twice this semester. If you click at the top of the page where it says "Prayer List" (or at the embedded sheet below), you'll find a list of all my students for this semester. If you're one of my students, you'll find your name on that list. On the date next to your name, know that I'll be praying specifically for you in whatever you're doing.

If you want to come find me and pray with me, cool. If you want to tell me ahead of time what to pray for specifically, great. If you don't really want to, that's fine, too. No matter what, I'll be asking God to take care of you and be with you, not only for that day, but in all your endeavors.

Cool? Cool. Hey, Friday's almost here—have a good last day of the first week, and enjoy your weekend, too!

Do you need Blogsy? Answer a quick survey to win a free* app!

Rather than handing in paper and killing trees [NOTE: the trees are already dead.], students will be doing the majority of their homework on a class blog. I have in-depth instructions on how to set one up, and I'm always available to tutor you through it as well, but simply setting up a blog is not enough.

A good blog includes pictures and video and interesting formatting, all with the purpose of earning (and keeping) your audience's attention. Typing up the information is really easy to do on your iPad--I mean, with a secret email address, you can even do it on Evernote or QuickOffice or the Mail app. However, if I'm going to give you TOAST points for including all the good elements of a blogpost, you're going to need to include some extra media.

This is where Blogsy, a favorite app of mine, comes into play. With this program, you can easily create a post that includes media, formatting, and clarity, all in a very easy-to-use package. Last semester, I wrote a primer on how to set up your blog with Blogsy, a must-read for TAPA students. We'll do some in-class training, too, for those of you struggling to figure it out. However, before any of that happens, we need to do something important: GET YOU THE APP.

You can just to to the App Store and buy it yourself, or I can purchase it for you and gift it to you in class. It's up to you, but you've got to let me know as soon as possible. This link (and the QR code to the left) will take you to a form you can fill out that will tell me if you need to buy it, if you want me to buy it for you, or if you already have it. This is a required app for Webb classes, and I will be giving you a quiz that includes the question:

DO YOU HAVE BLOGSY INSTALLED?

Those are fake smiles. They're actually angry.

If it's not, you're losing points, your grades will suffer, you'll probably not graduate from high school, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life giving pedicures to crocodiles. For free.

So, one more time:

TAKE THE QUICK 15-SECOND SURVEY TO LET ME KNOW HOW YOU ARE GETTING BLOGSY ONTO YOUR IPAD. RIGHT NOW.

Good.

*The app isn't really free, but I will freely buy it for you with your money. Sorry.

Required Apps for Webb classes

Originally posted 8/4/11.

For our second year, Taipei Adventist Preparatory Academy is going "full-iPad"—thin, electronic tablets instead of heavy paper books. Being that now students will have computing power at their fingertips, they won't simply be expected to use their iPads as textbooks—they'll also be expected to use them for enhancing their learning other ways, as well. There is a set list of apps that are required school-wide, but there's also a special list of (mostly) free apps that will be expected to be used in Mr. Webb's classes:

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GoodReader The "bread-and-butter" app of TAPA, this will be the program that you use the most. You'll use GoodReader to access your textbooks (scanned in as PDFs), but it's more than just a viewing app. You can write notes, highlight text, draw shapes, search text (and notes, and highlights, and anything shape you put in), and, strangely enough, even watch videos that won't play natively on the built-in Movies app.

QuickOffice Pro HD Basically, this is Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, but designed specifically for the iPad. The PowerPoint feature is especially pretty cool, as it allows you to create and display your presentation easily, through the use of the iPad-to-VGA (Projector) adapter AirServer, onto the Mac Minis in every classroom. This has Dropbox and Google Docs integration, too, so sign in to get the most out of it.

Evernote Where do you start? Note-taking abilities? Check; does it better than Notepad, and includes rich text and the ability to add in pictures. Recording audio? Hit the little  icon and easily record your teacher's talk. Remembering what the whiteboard said? Take a photo of the board and put it in, and, later, you can search the picture for text. Add in tagging (the best feature you're not using), and, most importantly, everything backed up to the internet, and you've got a killer app you should be using every period.

Blogsy (Soon...) Most students know about my ginormous crush on Blogsy. I only love it because 1) it's everything I've ever wanted for a mobile blogging app, and 2) it's awesome developer personally has listened to me about a few new features. With all the blogging you're going to be doing in my classes, you'd be silly to not purchase this as soon as possible. ***UPDATE*** Now required! And I'll even buy it for you!

Dropbox I've written the long version before, but, in short, Dropbox is a virtual, internet-based flash drive that updates documents instantly anywhere you have it installed. Install it onto your home computer and your iPad, and log into each account; then, write an essay on your home computer, and it'll show up on your iPad. Edit on the iPad, and it's fixed at home. Best of all, it'll protect you from losing everything if your break your iPad. Required for success.

Scan There's a hundred QR readers on iTunes, and you technically can get any one you want, but Scan is my personal favorite. It's as simple of a program as you can get: just point the camera at any QR code and boom—Information instantly. At the very least, pick up this free app.

Easy QR "BUT MISTAH WEBBAH, WHY WE NEEDAH TWO QR APPSAH?" First off, speak better English. Secondly, occasionally, one of the QR readers won't work as well as the other, so it's smart to have 2. But, most importantly, Easy QR allows you to easily make your own QR codes to distribute any number of ways. Smart to have.

Minu Timer For the most part, the only app that we'll use for Communications class will be the YouTube app, which you will use for uploading your practice speeches. However, if there's another I'd really love to have every student to have, it would be this timer app. Very simple and elegant, Minu Timer is my preferred choice, and what I'll most likely use in timing your speeches during class.

iBooks Soon, in my classes, I'll be releasing a textbook that will contain nearly all of the reading material we'll be using in all my classes throughout the year. Until iTunes approves it, we'll be on standby, but it's not a stupid idea to download this to be ready for when I amaze you.

Stanza While GoodReader is an awesome PDF reader, it lacks a pretty important function: reading other types of files, such as ePub (for eBooks) and CBZs/CBRs (for digital comic books). Whatever GoodReader cannot read, Stanza can and will. Its PDF reader isn't amazing, but the other features it can do will more than make up for it. iBooks will also work, but Stanza is infinitely better.

Shakespeare (Free) An absolute necessity for anyone planning on taking first semester of British Literature, we will read at least 3 plays off this app. The free version is all that's necessary, although the paid app does have a built-in glossary for those tough-to-understand Shakespearean words.

Free Books It's pretty amazing to me that this app designer has been able to get over 23,000 books into his app, all legally, and all for free, but it's true. For my classes, often times, if we're able to get the book for free, I'll just ask you to download them from this app rather than purchase you the book yourself. It'll save you time and money.