Slide deck

I still find it funny how some technological 'upgrades' just don't do things as well as older tech. In university I had a touch screen laptop with a pen - the finger touch wasn't as good as now (pressure I think, rather than capacitative, and none of the fancy tricks like two finger) but the pen just worked great for me for writing. When touch screens became fashion for laptops for a while that sounded great... but they couldn't at all do the job I lost in my stylus-input Toshiba. And, as a Toshiba, it was decent generally as a not too expensive laptop.

I was lucky that about the time I got it, Linux support was coming out for Wacom tablets. (Which is what was integrated in the screen, I guess.) Incidentally, Xournal turned out way better than any of the programs I had on Windows for writing/drawing and for annotating PDFs. Including Microsoft Office's "One-somethingorother" (I forget the name now.) The Office one was so unexpectedly clunky, and also less powerful. Ah, shame I don't have much use for Xournal these days with no pen input screen. ...Oh, except every time I have to fill in a pdf form, if it's not set up or not set up right. Xournal is more clunky for that task than I'd hope from a pdf annotator, but it just works when other things don't.

... Sorry, nostalgic rant over.

You could make an overhead projector with an led light source.

The whole reason you had those problems was due to shitty incandescent or halogen lights inside of the projector. You swap that out with modern high power LEDs and your complains basically disappear.

I have no option but to use a personal phone for work. It's required for MFA to log into everything from my email to the business bank account so we can authorise payroll. But also we haven't had reliable phone line in our office since before I started working there 3 years ago. So I make work calls from my mobile all the time. No idea why the phones are so shit, we've gone through 3 Telecoms, 8 handsets and spent 18 months coordinating with the department of housing (who own our building) to let the government NBN technicians access the property, run fibre to premises and run maintenance. Nothing has worked. We have no problems with loosing internet access, but for some reason the phones will just randomly go down every 20 minutes, with downtimes ranging from 20 minutes to 14 days, and none of the professionals I'm reaching out to for help have any idea why.

And I know, I know, "you should demand access to a dedicated work phone", true, but the budget at our organisation is tight. I've already had to reduce my classes from 3 hours to 2 hours this year because our department of education contact is less than last year (despite having more students packed in than ever before) and if I wanted to to get paid for my labour year I had to reduce my hours so the budget could stretch for the whole school year. I couldn't just take a pay cut because union would be up my ass about being paid below award rate. We're one of the few organisations who still have teachers on payroll (earning leave benefits and receiving employer super contributions) every other centre has moved to subcontracting teachers who operate as sole traders. This let's the organisation cut costs and force teachers to buy their own whiteboard markers. We refuse to stoop that's low at my organisation. I may not have a work phone but at least I don't have to supply my own toilet paper like I did at my last job.

It doesn't bother me to have my phone used in the classroom. I teach seniors how to use their phones (I teach at a community centre). So I have a "dummy phone" that I use at work too, because if I'm doing a demo on how to do something on a phone, I need a phone to do the demo on.

This is a separate phone from my main device. I use my main device as my Authenticator phone. I'm not going to use the training phone for that, as that phone has purposefully been compromised to better resemble the problems my students experience with their phones so I can show them how to fix it.

But setting up my personal phone as a camera or middle man in a weird chain of casting (for example, when I'm doing ipad lessons, I have no way of sharing the ipad screen to the cheap Android TV we have, so I set up a teams meeting between the ipad and my phone, share my ipad screen with the phone, and then cast my phone to the TV.

Is there a better way to do that? Absolutely, 100%.

Is there a better way to do that for free with the resources I already have available? Not that I have been able to find with my limited time available to research one.

We are given no resources in community education, or the resources we are given are so outdated. We're expected to to teach students how to use Microsoft 365 as part of the 2022 curriculum, but the department only gives us student licenses for Office 2010 because we're Community Ed, we get the leftovers from Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary education. We apply for grants to get what we need, but that's hours of our time that's unpaid writing grants to try and get some money in our budget. (if we get the grant, we obviously back pay the grant writer, but if we don't get the grant...)