Daily Archives: 2017-06-17

With a little help from my friend

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It’s awful when you see your mind go to mush.  That happened to me last week in my weekly discussion about This Week in Ontario Edublogs.  (TWIOE)  It’s my weekly discussion with Stephen Hurley about five of the great blog posts that I’ve read in the past week.

And, it was right in the middle where my mind went completely blank.

Now, to set the stage.

I come to these shows with Stephen well prepared, or so I thought.

If you were to look at my desktop, it’s like Exhibit A for a person who needs to exercise some self-control with tabs open in a browser.

In addition to my standard open tabs – Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, Facebook, Inbox, Outlook, and Flipboard, I had the following.  My TWIOE post has seven blog posts to talk about but I’ll only use five for the show.  They each are open in a tab.  Off the end, I have a number of open tabs for various things I’m working on or exploring, and finally a document where I have my notes for the show.

Now, I’ve seen people who have presentations written word for word and they essentially read them.  That’s a turnoff to me.  Similarly, I’ve seen people with no preparation at all and just wing it.  That’s another turnoff.  I’m kind of in the middle and have a few points that I want to make sure that I don’t forget and my discussion with Stephen fills the rest.

We were about half way through the show and talking about Larissa Aradj’s post.  Even the name had me doing some practice pronunciation to get it right.  (I hoped.  I’ve only met Larissa once at last year’s BIT Conference where she introduced herself as Larissa and then her Twitter handle to put it into context.)

Here are my notes for things to talk about when we got to her post.

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So, I’m chatting away with Stephen talking about the concept and the wonderful instructions in her post when I get to the Tutorials for the Apple stuff.  In her post, she talks about how to use the “Instant Alpha” feature with Pages and

BLANK

Yep.  My mind went blank.  I didn’t know what to say next.  Pages and … Pages and … Pages and …

In the background, I’m clicking on tabs looking for her post for the answer.  Do you think I could find it?  I’m floundering as I try to remember; Stephen was no help; Larissa was at the ballet; …

Then, in my clicking flurry, I happen to get to Twitter where my friend Peter was there to help me out.  I got this private message.

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Well, of course, it would be Keynote.  But do you think I could remember it at the time?

Isn’t it great to know that, in times like this, your friends have your back covered?

OTR Links 06/17/2017

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.