How do you use an application in a non-standard way?

[woodsmoke]

Just what the title says.

I'll start off with something that I am experimenting with for a new class that I am teaching.

As opposed to my other classes which are somewhat "canned" I have been given free rein with this one and carte blanche for equipment.

Because of that there are no "previous lesson plans" by another teacher that I can visit about to get a sense of how the class flows.

I'm doing the thing tabula rasa as it were and that is fitting in that most people say that I wake up in a new world every day anyway!

So, I am using the Kontact Journal subsection to record what I did in a day and at the end of the semester that will be printed out as a full set of lesson plans. I'm not using terminology like "I did that", instead it is "Discuss this..."

Now YES....I really DO have a full set of lesson plans kind of sketched out in my head and these have been recorded in the "to do" list subsection so that they will appear sequentially and in order, as the semester progresses. As the semester wears on I will expand the to do list into a "mini" lesson plan in the week prior to the class. In case of my illness I can quickly expand on it for a substitute teacher.

The mini lesson plan will then be expanded in the conduct of the actual class to a full lesson plan.

If one really thinks hard about it, a "lesson plan" book has two pages for a week that are filled with a set of boxes about two inches by two inches in which the teacher writes the pages and a small note about what is to be "covered that day" and "assigned". This was always generally worthless to me so I started using a word processor when they appeared and a substitute had a page of information from which to work.

The only problem was finding the correct page with the word processor search function which often broke down part way through a search!

I am hoping that Kontact will streamline the original idea.

So.....in what unusual way do you use an application so that others can be inspired by your example!

woodsmoke

[woodsmoke]

Re: How do you use an application in a non-standard way?

just a short note:

I have not yet figured out a way, and don't think that presently there "is" a way to export the text of the journal. One can print an entry or edit but not export, at least that I have found.

What I am doing as a "workaround" is to copy and paste the entries, in order, into Koffice and save them and a usb stick and will later save to a cd.

Now...have i done with two steps what I did before as one step by writing in a document? Yes, but I consider this to be an "exercise" to test the idea........which I may stop doing at the end of the semester and just go back to a Kwrite doc!!

Finding previous journal entries is not "intuitive", at least to me, in that I would expect that one goes to "journal" and then could somehow search for the entries or something from within the application.

However, the calendar is displayed in the left hand panel, and dates that have a journal entry are Black/Bold. When one clicks the date the journal entries appear.

woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: How do you use an application in a non-standard way?

I'm not really clear on what you want to do, but a thought that comes to mind is to use a blog for your journal entries. the text from a blog could be easily searched and imported into a word processor.

[GreyGeek]

Re: How do you use an application in a non-standard way?

Sounds like a great use for Google Docs!

[woodsmoke]

Re: How do you use an application in a non-standard way?

Hi Both of you....

right on... i was hoping that others, like you, might post such things to get others to think out of box.

woodsmoke