Blogging 4 Everyone

Blogging 4 Everyone is a resource for anyone who wants to learn how to blog. It has very simple, straightforward instructions for starting a blog including a video.

It does not mention Blogger, so here is my instructions for getting started with Blogger.

This would be a good resource to use if you want to create your own blog or if you are trying to get your students using blogs in class.

Welcome back to School!

Welcome back to school! I hope everyone had a great summer and was able to relax and recharge. We started this week with teachers back on Monday, freshmen on Wednesday, and all students today. It's been a little hectic, but things are working out.

Here are some resources to help you get the year started.

Create a Personal Learning Network - a PLN is an excellent resource for help, advice, and sharing ideas.

Google for Educators - Google has a huge number of free resources for teachers and students. Check them all out (they're all free).

New Teacher Advice - some good advice for new teachers (and old ones too!)

Discovery Education New Teacher Survival Central - a great resource for all teachers (and free).

List of Discovery Education Resources for Educators - very good, inclusive list of Discovery Educations resources.

Overview of some free technology that can help you be more organized and efficient. 

Some great websites and blogs to check out:

Tech and Learning Magazine - great magazine with educational and technology information and resources. Free subscription for teachers.

Edutopia - George Lucas foundation site dedicated to education.

Twitter - Twitter is a great resource for educators, especially #edchat.
(and follow me on Twitter @daveandcori)

Enjoy these resources and share yours with others.

iTALC - computer management

iTALC is a free, open source, computer management system. It enables teachers to control student computers, including monitoring what the students are doing, remote control to help users, lock out workstations, send text messages to students, remote power on/off and reboot and more.

It is extremely easy to install and use. It took me less than 10 minutes to download and install the admin version on my computer. I loaded the software and the key onto my network drive and then logged on to each computer in my room (there are 8) and installed the client version in less than 3 min for each computer. It then took a few minutes to set up the main system on my computer with all the classroom computers linked.

iTALC is similar to systems like LANSchool, but free.

The wiki is also very helpful with the installation and set up.

DocsPal - Free online file Converter and Viewer

DocsPal is a free online file converter. You simply upload your file, select the original file format and what you want it converted to, and click convert. The link to the converted file will appear on the screen. You can also have the link sent to you via email.

I converted an Excel spreadsheet with graphs to PDF format in about 15 seconds.

It is still in Beta and only supports about 30 file formats, but more are being worked on.

This is great for educators who use one type of software or operating system at school and different ones at home or have students using different systems.

Board800 - web based Interactive Whiteboard

Board800 is a free, web based interactive white board that can be used by multiple users at the same time.

It is very easy to use and you can save your session. Tools include shapes, free drawing, and text. Your session can be saved as an image for later retrieval, archiving, or to embed in a document or web site.

This would be great for distance meetings, distance learning, tutoring, homework help, and much more.

You can also purchase a server version to host yourself for a fee.

Teaching with Technology

Teaching with Technology is a great resource for teachers. It has a list of different technology resources for educators. The resources are grouped in tables by category. Categories include Tools for: Creating, editing, and sharing; Communicating and networking; Managing time, tasks, and information, and Making it all work.

Many of the resources I've covered here in this blog, but there are a lot of other great resources listed. Everything from documents to presentations to videos to Skype to Twitter to Google Calendar to Remember the Milk to firewalls and anti-virus.

This is definitely a site to check out and bookmark.

TodaysMeet - back channel hosting

TodaysMeet is a free service that allows you to create a back channel for your meeting, class, or presentation. You name it, create the hash tag (for Twitter) and select how long you want it to be kept before being deleted, and you are all set.

It is simple to set up and use.

Back channels are a way for students, meeting participants, or the audience in a presentation to post comments, questions, and discussions during the class, meeting, or presentation. They are becoming more and more popular. They can also be used to gather information and data from an audience.

Miscellaneous Technology Resources

Here are some great technology resources for anyone:

LogMeIn - LogMeIn allows you to remotely access someone else's computer (with their permission and cooperation, of course) so that you can help them fix a problem. It's much easier than having them try to explain the problem over the phone, or you having to drive to their house.

TwitFS - share files on Twitter. Free accounts are available and you can create a link to videos, audio clips, pictures, documents and more and Tweet them to your followers.

Showmewhatswrong - this site allows you to generate a help URL so that your "technically challenged" friends and family can send you instant screen recordings of their computer so that you can help them trouble shoot their computer issues.

300th Post!! Free online calculators

This is my 300th post!! I have really enjoyed doing this - sharing resources with other educators. Thanks for all of the encouragement and feedback!

This post is a listing of some free online calculators. I have used them all and really find them to be great resources for teachers and students.

Here is a list of 6 that I've used and like. The first one is my favorite.

Web 2.0 Calculator

Encalc

Math help Scientific Calculator

Online Scientific Calculator

MotionNet Engineering Directory Calculator (also has other resources on it).

Do you have any others? Any free downloadable Scientific Calculators?

Readability - clean up web displays for better reading

Readability is a nice piece of free technology. It installs on your web browser as a bookmarklet and then will take a web page and get rid of all of the flashing ads and other distractions and just leave the text behind to make it easier to read. You set up a free account and you can select how you want it to display the text. It is very easy to use. It is not 100% perfect, but if it there are errors on the screen, just reload the original web page.

Below is an image of an article on my local newspaper's web site and then below it is the article after Readability was used.

(Thanks to my Twitter PLN for telling me about David Pogue's article in the NY Times about Readability).

What do you think? I think it makes reading things online much easier on the eyes and may prevent some people from printing things out to read them.

GetBodySmart - Human A&P

GetBodySmart is an interactive web site that helps students learn about human anatomy and physiology. It has interactive flash animations, tutorials, and quizzes. It is very easy to use and navigate and is well designed with very good graphics.

The content is explained well and would be appropriate for high school or beyond.

I would recommend this to any human biology, anatomy and physiology, EMS or medical class students.

Open Office for Kids

I just learned about OpenOffice for Kids from the Download Squad even though I've used OpenOffice for years.

OpenOffice for Kids is smaller sized, less featured, but easier to use version of OpenOffice. It includes word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. It is set up with a slightly different menu system with most commonly used functions as larger, more obvious buttons. The smaller file size and less cluttered user interface mean it loads and works faster.

I tried it out and agree with others that it is easy and fast to use and is probably a good choice for people out side of the grade 7-12 target audience.

I think it would be a great piece of software to use on net books also due to the smaller file size and faster loading and running.

Free Photo Editing Software

Photoscape is a very powerful, free, photo editing software. It allows you to modify and correct photos, add frames, add captions and graphics, and even create collages. I was very impressed in how easy it was to use and how powerful it was. Check out their site for some great examples of what you can do with it.

Thanks to Online Tech Tips for the tip about Photoscape.

Computer Time Saving Tips

The 2.0 Life has a great article on Time Saving Tips for Your Computer.

I knew some of them, but found a few more that are great. Many of them are keyboard shortcuts that allow you to do things that would normally take more time to do. An example: Show Desktop - Press Windows-M (the windows key between ctrl and alt and "m") on a PC. Instead of closing or minimizing all of your open windows, you just press F11 and it minimizes all of your windows so you can see the desktop to get at files and programs.

These tips can make you more efficient while using your computer.

Free quick reference guides for software

Custom Guide has free quick reference guides for different types of software, including Windows, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more. You can download the PDF files for free.

These are great resources to have handy to help you when working with these software titles.

Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is the most widely used office productivity suite, but it isn't the only one. It used to come included with many computers, but nowadays it is only a trial version. This means that people are having to pay for Microsoft Office in addition to the cost of a computer. Many people are still using Office 2003, which Microsoft will stop supporting in the future. With budgets a major issue, as usual, schools, teachers, and students can get free alternatives to Microsoft Office.

There are some free alternatives out there. The two I use are Google Docs and Openoffice.org.

Google Docs, detailed more here, is great for online collaboration of documents because you can share the documents with others. Everything is hosted online, although there is an offline version. It is great for students because their documents are stored online and they can access them from any internet accessable computer. Google Docs includes word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications. Because it is web based, you can use it on Windows, Mac, or Linu. And, it's free.

Openoffice.org is free software from Sun Microsystems. Unlike Google Docs, Openoffice is software you download to your computer and the files reside on your computer. (for ideas on syncing files among multiple computers, check out SugarSync).

Openoffice is a fully functional office productivity system that rivals Microsoft Office in many ways and includes applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, formulas and graphics. I have found it really easy to use coming from Microsoft Office since the menu's and commands are very similar. Openoffice can save files in many formats, including Microsoft Office formats so that you can use them on other computers without a problem. Openoffice is available in multiple languages and for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Google Docs and OpenOffice can save students, faculty, and schools a fortune in licensing fees and allow better collaboration and productivity.

Evernote - free online notes and more!

Evernote is a great, free resource that allows you to easily capture information using whatever device or operating system you use. It then makes this information accessible and searchable from anywhere. Their tagline: Remember Everything.

You can capture task lists, notes, web pages, white boards, business cards, pictures, and even clip web pages to Evernote.

You can download a desktop version of the software, for free, which will sync to the Evernote web server, or you can just access it through the internet on their web page. You can also access it through a mobile device. They have downloadable applications for the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Windows Mobile devices. You can also access their mobile website on any web-enabled phone.

You can create new notes via desktop, web, or mobile version. You can also use your camera phone or web cam to take a snapshot and Evernote can even recognize the text in the image.

You can also email notes, clip web pages, record audio notes, and scan papers, receipts and more into Evernote.

Their website has easy to follow instructions and help sections. The blog section even has a recent entry about teachers using Evernote:

Teachers: Organize your lesson plans in Evernote.

You can put all your notes, outlines, activities, research, etc in Evernote and have it searchable and accessible from anywhere. That way you can start working on a lesson plan at home then continue working on your computer in your class. You can tag lesson plans with specific topics or subjects to make calling them up the next school year even easier.

Evernote is very useful, easy to use, platform independant, and FREE. Get your life organized using Evernote.

Some great resources for students

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation - The Lemelson Center is a great resource that explores invention and innovation in history, the story behind great inventions and the site provides resources and ideas to encourage inventive creativity in young people. I found the site fascinating and fun.

iWrite - iWrite, from GreatSource.com, is a great resource for writing for students. It includes tips, ideas, grammar help and more. It is very easy to navigate also. A must for any student who has to write.

Great Source has a huge variety of resources for students, in every subject and topic area, including math, science, reading, writing, test prep, and technology.

Fresh Brain - "At the core of FreshBrain is an open and free web site freshbrain.org that provides teens with the opportunity to explore, engage, and create through activities and projects. FreshBrain takes advantage of the latest technologies, such as web conferencing and social networking, to provide a very progressive environment where teens can complete activities and work together on projects. This experience is enhanced with Advisors, available to support and mentor teens who are working on projects, with the intention of increasing the likelihood of success. In addition, FreshBrain provides teens with tools and training in the latest technologies to complete these projects."

Fresh Brain is a great resource and very easy to use. The technology products and resources help students build 21st Century Skills and learn how to use Web 2.0 technologies. These skills will be very important to them in college and in careers.

Online Tech Tips

Online Tech Tips is a great resource for anyone who uses computers. The site has great information on tricks, tips, updates, and fixes for your computer.

Today's tip was on how to change the default media player in Windows. The method shown is also used for changing the default software for any type of file.

The site is well designed and easy to use and the tips are written in a way that most computer users can understand. It has a huge variety of information and resources that are very useful.

The site offers RSS feeds and email subscriptions so that you can keep up with any new tips.

Another great resource for teachers

Richard Byrne has a great blog called "Free Technology for Teachers." In his blog, he talks about free technology resources for educational use. He also links to a wiki page with tons of resources. I'm really impressed with his list of resources and I suggest all teachers take a look at what he has listed.

I really like his post about Copyright issues. In this post, he embedds a great slideshow explaining educational copyright issues. I suggest that all teachers read this post.