The Green Cup

This week my new tech tool was screen capture. I used a program I’d come across a while back (but had never actually installed) from a company called Etrusoft.

!Quick Screen Capture (the name of their program) was easy to install and quite easy to use. I used it to caputre a series of screens that have to do with the West Virginia Department of Education’s WebTop program.

WebTop is an cloud-based personal desktop that West Virginia educators and (eventually) students can sign up for. It allows them to maintain their own access to a particular set of tools and documents despite having to move from classroom to classroom (or even school to school, depending on their job).

Let me show you some of the screens I captured (you can click on them to get a larger image)…

To log onto WebTop you go to http://wvde.k12.wv.us. The page looks like this:

In the blue box on the left of the page, the second option down is “WEBTOP LOGIN.” Click on that and you get this page:

I fed in my user ID and password:

And I got this (my own virtual desktop):

I haven’t done much with mine yet. So you might call this the standard look. Let’s take a look at the four folders on the WebTop. Going from left to right, the first folder is the WVDE forlder. Inside you find this:

The folder contains:

• a shortcut to the State Department of Education website (the little A+ thinggy)
• a link to a page that will let you check your state issued email account (and you have to have an “access” email account to get a WebTop account)
• a link to WebTop Communities (kind of like Facebook for state teachers; I’ll look at WebTop Communities in some detail on another day).
• Several Google tools that you can maintain separately from any personal Google account you might have.
• A couple of other tools that at this point I haven’t used.
• And a link to page where you can look up other teachers you know of in the state and find their email address (a handy tool).

I used this box most often to click on through to the WebTop Communities page.

When you open the “Teacher Tools” folder you get this:

The folder gives me access to the Manhattan Virtual Classroom. I also get a link to upcoming professional development opportunities, some online textbooks, and a place where teachers can check their own certifications.

The third folder is on project based learning. Inside:

There’s the Manhattan Virtual Classroom, an eportfolio tool called “epearl,” and some Google tools.

The last folder is for student tools and it currently contains just a link to Acuity, the state’s benchmark assessment program.

You get the idea. You get the idea about WebTop. And you get the idea about screen capture. The only problem with screen capture is that the Etrusoft tool isn’t free. I may pay for it (eventually) but I’ll look for a good free screen capture tool first.

On Wednesday I have a workshop on WebTop in Charleston. For now, I think I’ll play the chess game featured in WebTop’s software folder…