Freeze, AV Mute and other Cool Things to do with Your Epson Remote

​​Most teachers now have some kind of projector (Brightlink/Smartboard)  in their classroom and they all seem to come with the same remote.  I just discovered some cool things that you can do with it and of course, I wanted to share!

Freeze – Press the Freeze button to freeze the image on the screen. Then you can use your computer to do your own work while leaving the screen frozen on what your class needs to see.

AV​ Mute – Temporarily turn off the display video and audio. I’ve noticed that lots of teachers use this feature to save the light bulb without having to turn the machine off and then on again in a few minutes when you need it again.

Display Pointer – Pressing this puts an arrow on the screen that you can control using the arrow buttons on the remote.

Page Up and Down buttons – These can be used to move through slides in your PowerPoint or other slide presentation.  This only works if you are not using a pen: ​Click here for more information.​

Here is a picture that explains what all the buttons do:

From: https://nerdtechy.com/epson-powerlite-l500w-review​ ​

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

A picture is worth a thousand words! We are posting pictures and using images that we find online everyday to enhance our multimedia presentations. It is important to teach students to respect copyright and the work that people post on line.  Students should be encouraged to use images that are licensed as Creative Commons or public domain.  

To find these type of images in Google Chrome, follow these steps:

1. Type your topic into Google
2. Click on Images
3. Click on Tools
4. Click on Usage Rights
5. Click on Creative Commons License (this ensure that you are using images that are permitted by the person who put the image online)
​What does Creative Commons Mean?  Watch this video to learn:
There are also many sites out there that offer Creative commons images free for your use.  This article contains links to many of the free image sites:

18 Free Image Sites and Tools for Schools​

I usually check them before using the pictures because some of them would like you to put a link to their site.

Some good guidelines for using online images:

1.Give the creator of the images credit for their work (put the link from where you got the picture-you may need to actually visit the site that the picture is from as it is not acceptable to give a link to Google Images).

2. Get the pictures from a place that is designed for pictures to be shared (for example, Pi​xabay).

3.  Use pictures at are licensed Creative Commons.

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How to ChatGPT Proof Your Assignments

I will readily admit to anyone that I love Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find it fascinating.  AI is a very hot topic and it is changing so fast it is hard to keep up! While ChatGPT is an amazing tool for us and our students to use, there are some scary,  more nefarious uses for it as well.   Please read on to find some tips for preventing your students from using AI​ for cheating and a very important tip about SnapChat AI from Safer Schools.​

I just finished watching a fabulous presentation by Ryan Orilio, a Director of Technology from New York and another presentation by George Couros.  Here is what I learned:

Using an AI detector is not a great way to discover if a student is using AI in their assignments.  They have proven  to be unreliable and prone to giving false results that could cause you to accuse an innocent student of cheating, while also placing their personal writing in a potentially unsafe place online. Still, most schools are not blocking ChatGPT-there are so many places to use AI available, students will just find another one.  It seems like AI will not be going away so it is time for us to step up our game and learn to use it as the incredible tool that it is.​

Here are some ways that Ryan Orilio talked about to “cheatproof” your assignments to prevent students from using ChatGPT and other AI tools to write them:

​1.  Ask students to write about something deeply personal. For example, have the students talk about a challenge they have faced or how a piece of writing relates to their own life.

2.  Ask students to write about current or local events. The free version of ChatGPT does not have current knowledge and it is not designed to search for current events.  You could ask students to compare current events to something that happened in the past.

3.  Do more writing in class. Yes, it is more work for all but it works.

4. Ask students to show or explain their work.  Even if they used AI to help, they would need to understand it,

5. Have students hand in more than one draft.

6.  Have students explain what they did and why? Why did they choose this topic?

7.  Ask students to present some form of oral presentation. Microsoft Flip, iMovie, or just recording an audio recording with force them to read their presentation out loud and analyze it.

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