While many of you may have thought I dropped off the earth, I assure you I have been busy. Besides PhD work, preparing classes, and having a new baby, I am very happy to announce that I have also finished a major side project and am ready to release to the world (drum roll please……….)

Multimedia Digital Greek flashcards I have cleverly called:

NT GREEK VOCABULARY EXPANSION PACKS (catchy, hey!) website

What are they?
They are expansion packs to help first year Greek students learn their vocabulary in ways that will help it stick— by feeding their brain with audio, images, and cooky mnemonics. The fact is, many people are auditory or visual learners, and today’s flashcards (and old-fashioned paper flashcards) are not delivering the vocabulary in ways it can be more easily retained by the student. These expansion packs seek to feed the brain in ways that it learns. Every lexical form of a word has an image/mnemonic, and audio attached to them. Non-lexical forms (i.e. different principal parts) have audio.

How does it work?
This is not an application! Rather, they are expansion packs that I’ve created to work with two very good existing flashcard programs— Flash! Pro for PC users, and iFlash for Mac users. People need these programs to use the expansion packs.

What grammars is it compatible with?
Only the best, dude! The expansion pack comes in 4 flavors to correspond to 4 introductory Greek textbooks, with the vocabulary keyed to the chapters:
Learn to Read New Testament Greek by David Alan Black
A Primer of Biblical Greek by N. Clayton Croy
Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce
New Testament Greek Primer by Gerald Stevens

How Much of a whole in my pocket will it be?
Only $6 bucks (US) for the expansion pack of your choice. What’s more, Ken Penner (owner of Flash! Pro) has generously agreed to give $8 off of Flash! Pro for any who buy one of my expansion packs! Sweeeeeeet!

What about the free part?
This is the part where it pays to read through the whole post. If you are a professor teaching Intro Greek this year and using any of the 4 above textbooks, email me (danzac–atsign–gmail.com), with proof you are teaching this year, for your free expansion pack. You can repay me by telling your students about it if you like it, or maybe even suggesting it on your syllabus. If you happen to be the author of any of the 4 textbooks, you get your copy for free as well.
ALSO……
I gotta show some love for my fellow bibliobloggers. So, if you are a biblioblogger, email me (danzac–atsign–gmail.com), with proof that you actually are a biblioblogger and not someone who started a blog today for the freebie, for the free expansion pack of your choice. All I ask is that you give me a polite review of the expansion pack on your blog. The biblioblogger offer will only last for 2 weeks— but professors will always get it for free.

This post is long enough, so I will end by directing you to the website for these expansion packs, where you will find a video demo, image examples, and purchasing information. the address is www.deinde.org/ntgreek-flashcards/.

p.s. Many thanks to ADC, a student named Lorraine Street for helping me big time with this project, and to my Greek students who push me to deliver the content in new and exciting ways. I hope many other students in classes elsewhere will benefit from this.

I am a big fan of effectively using technology, both for academic study and teaching. Due to my position at ADC as an I.T. Manager, my boss and I have been able to think through and implement what I consider to be an ideal setup.

While formerly the ideal was to be able to allow anyone to bring up their own laptop, everyone knows that this invariably causes time delays and problems with the screen hookup —you can only hit F5 on a PC so many times before you want to throw it out the window! It really came to a head this past year, as the many Dell laptops seemed to extremely dislike the Dell docking stations they were placed upon in the classroom.

So here is the philosophy— put a computer in the classroom that can handle almost any file that is thrown at it, and play any media that would be used in the classroom. Do it in such a way that there is a minimum amount of setup. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve had to rewire classrooms as students or faculty tried to ‘fix up’ the wires and made it worse. We chose to minimize this, by making the volume— wherever it comes from— all come from the computer, and the volume controlled only by the computer. As to files used by teachers and students, we made it so that people only have to bring up a USB stick (sometimes, not even that. If someone has a Mac, it is exceedingly easy to drop files to another Mac on the same network). iWork, MS Office, and OpenOffice files are all supported. Accordance Bible software is also available on the computer for teacher use.

The result is the image below, a 20inch iMac with all the fixins’. Our trial classroom test was such a success that we have expanded the set up to two our other main classrooms.

I post this all in the hopes that it may inspire other to place technology in the classroom that helps teaching, saves time, and just works. Any questions, feel free to post them.

I need to take a moment to express my delight about the announced Oct. 26 release date of the new Mac OS/X ? and to express my confusion over why people still use PC’s. Given the problems some of my students have been having technology-wise, I now regard windows Vista as the spawn of the evil one. It really does make sense too. You may recall the verse in 2Cor, “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” This also applies to Vista. It is blatantly trying to look like Mac OS/X, but it is a wolf in sheeps clothing. Don’t be fooled!

I could highlight many really neat improvements, but some that caught my eye which will improve my study and research are:
1)RSS feed reading in Mail (to read the extraordinary biblioblog musings)
2) a much improved Preview. For PC lovers, preview is a pdf and image viewer that isn’t a beast like adobe reader. The improvements? Better annotations, like post-it notes, that are saved right on the PDF. And, the new preview will allow you to rearrange the pages in a PDF. How cool is that?
3) There is now a system-wide grammar checker. I need it!
4) Time Machine is a gargantuan addition to Mac OS/X. Say bye-bye to ever losing data again.
5) The Safari search and PDF enhancements will be very nice when doing research on the web
6) the last one is iChat theater. I am mulling over in my head how this may be useful as a teaching tool, here’s why: iChat now lets you go through a Keynote presentation in iChat. A second improvement is allowing you to record your iChat. So, theoretically I may be able to do a pretty decent video recording of myself going through a keynote presentation. I already do this with just audio for my Greek students, but adding my face to it could be pretty cool too!

Let me just reiterate? Macs Rock!