Educators – Get Prezi for Free!

Teachers, are you tired of PowerPoint? Are bullet points boring your students to tears? Changed your students’ glazed-over look during your presentations with Prezi! What is Prezi? Glad you asked! Prezi allows you to create dynamic, web-based presentations that go beyond the monotony of slide-by-slide PowerPoints. Here’s an example about Web 2.0 tools:

Also, notice that your Prezis can be embedded into a website. That means your presentations can be placed into your teacher web page for student review. Sign up for a free account today at: http://prezi.com/profile/signup/edu/.

-Lucas

Topsail High’s Stephen Jeffcoat Suggests Using Twitter to Give Homework

Here’s Stephen’s suggestion:

—–

In collaboration with Lucas Gillispie, I have discovered an easy way for
you to upload homework assignments, and allow your students to receive
the assignment on the web, by-email, or by TEXT MESSAGE!!  To see it in
action, go to my classroom page and click on the link for homework
assignments.

A brief rundown of how it works:
1) Create a twitter account for your class (www.twitter.com)
2) Add a link to your account to your webpage
3) Post your homework assignments on twitter.  It takes about 10
seconds.  You just have to condense the assignment to 140 characters or
less.
4) Your students can view the assignments by clicking on the link from
your webpage, and they can then subscribe to receive text message
updates or e-mail updates, or just view it on the web.

It’s that easy.

Best part:  IT’S FREE.  Standard text messaging rates apply to the
students if they choose to receive text updates, but it costs you
nothing.
If you would like more information/an official training session on this,
stop by my classroom tomorrow after school.

Stephen

—–

Thanks Stephen!

-Lucas

Google Docs in Plain English

Google Documents is a great web-based service, provided by Google, that allows you to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets online.  Here’s another great video by the folks at Commoncraft.com:

Smarter Web Searches

As I’m doing my literature review for video games and their use in education, I’m nearly swamped with vast amounts of information when I do a Google search. It’s very difficult to find just what I’m looking for. Again, the guys at CommonCraft have some tips. Enjoy!

-Lucas

Tech Terms: What’s A Wiki?

We’re constantly drowning in a sea of new terms in education, especially from technology. To help with this, I’m going to be adding videos to the blog from the folks at CommonCraft.com. These guys make understanding technology easy! Our first one will be Wiki’s! Wiki’s have many uses in education. Enjoy!

-Lucas

PC Magazine Offers Eight Handy Tools in Microsoft Word You Probably Didn’t Know About

PC Magazine just released a brief online article describing eight time and energy-saving tips for Microsoft Word that you may not have known.  Check them out at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2314059,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03129TX1K0000625

Happy word processing!

-Lucas

Groupwise Tip #1: Retracting Sent Emails in Groupwise

With Groupwise you can retract or “unsend” an email sent to other Groupwise users in our system. Let’s say you send an email without attaching a file you meant to attach, sent it to the wrong person or sometimes you just want that email back without the intended recepient ever knowing they had received the email. The only caveat is that the email must be unopened. If the email has been opened by the recipent then you are out of luck. If not… here are the steps to check whether it has been opened and then retract it.

1. Click on your Sent Items 

2. Now let’s check to see if the email has been opened yet. In this example Example Email #1 has not been opened yet while Example Email #2 has been. How can I tell? The envelope beside Example Email #1 is not opened while the envelope beside Example Email #2 has been opened.

 3. Since Example Email #1 has not been opened all I have to do is select it and click the ”Delete From All Mailboxes” button to retract it.

- Chuck Allen, PCS Network Guy

So, what is RSS?

Have you heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication)? It’s a tool that can make your web browsing much simpler and save you lots of time. Put the Internet to work for you! The guys at Common Craft have created an easy-to-understand explanation:

-Lucas Gillispie, PCS Tech Coordinator

Tech Tip – Secure Your Password!

Today you can access your bank account online, buy a hard-to-find collectible on Ebay, file your taxes electronically, or even simply check your email. Each time you do so, very important personal information travels across the Internet. Identity theft is a very real threat. So, aside from safe and responsible Internet use, how do we protect ourselves? Secure passwords!

NCWISE is quickly approaching for our district and with it the issue of passwords. So are your passwords secure? Notice I said “passwords.” You have more than one right? If you use the same password for your email, online banking, and Ebay, I strongly urge you to consider creating some new ones. Hackers are out there and they love you. For whatever reason, they’re looking for information. If they are able to crack your password they can use it to access other secure information, so it’s a good idea to have more than one password, and all of your passwords should be secure.

So what makes a password “secure?” Well, first off, it shouldn’t simply be a word from the dictionary. Those are easily cracked. Hackers employ programs that will crack passwords for them. They’re not sitting at a computer making guesses at your password. They have programs that will do that for them. Imagine a program using your user name trying the password “aardvark.” No? Didn’t work? Then what’s next in the dictionary? How about “aardvark01?” “Aardvark02?” Yes, these programs, programmed with the dictionary (and not just English) repeatedly try different passwords and combinations until they are able to access your account(s). It’s called a brute force attack. The hacker doesn’t even have to be at his/her computer.

A password should be at least eight characters in length. Fourteen is ideal. You should avoid using ordinary words, because they can easily be cracked. However, adding numbers to a dictionary word makes it tougher to crack. The best passwords have a seemingly random assortment of letters and numbers. Something like “Tk7LoYphe54HoL” would be highly difficult for a hacking program to crack by brute force. But, who can remember that? A good solution is to create a phrase you can remember. For example, “My dog Sherman is 7 years old and brown.” Then covert that to an acronym, “MdSi7yoab.” Yes, you can probably remember that, yet the password looks like gibberish.

Changing your passwords periodically is also a critical step in security. NCWISE will require a password change every 90 days. Due to the volume of data that it contains, this is a critical security feature to protect ours and our students’ data. So, take a moment to consider your passwords and ones you might use in the future once NCWISE is implemented. If you want to test the strength of a password, Microsoft has created a password meter that will tell you whether a potential password is weak or strong. You can try it out here.

Happy Safe and Secure Computing!

-Lucas Gillispie, PCS Tech Coordinator

Tech Tip – Back Up Your Files

So, you’ve created an awesome series of PowerPoints to use in your classroom. They have great pictures, awesome animations, sounds, and more. Then, there’s a power surge… All your hard work is lost. It’s happened to all of us at some point. I know I’ve lost large papers for grad school, presentations, grades I’d entered into CMS Gradebook, and more. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but hopefully we’ve learned it. If not, you need to Save and Save Often! When you save important files, save them in two places.

So, what’s the best way to do this? Well, though our county PCs use Deep Freeze, each teacher is provided both a directory on your school’s server (accessed with your Novell login) and a “Thawspace” (often drive U:) which is a portion of your hard drive that is unaffected by Deep Freeze. You should always save any work you do on your classroom computer in either or both of those locations. It’s also a good idea to invest in a USB drive (sometimes called “flash drives” or “thumb drives”). You can get a flash drive today with a large amount of storage space (2GB or more) for less than $20.00 at your local office supply or department store. It’s worth the investment!

There’s another solution, too. There are companies that offer free online file storage, and files that you store there can be access from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. Technology Magazine, an online blog, has a pretty extensive list of companies that offer free, online file storage. Some of these companies offer up to 250 GB of free, online file storage. Keep in mind, however, though your files are typically secured with a username and password, you should probably avoid using one of these solutions for storing anything confidential. If it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a worksheet you’ve created, though, this is a great solution.

-Lucas Gillispie, PCS Tech Coordinator