Free Technology for Teachers: ParticiPoll - Add Interactive Polls to PowerPoint

Free Technology for Teachers: ParticiPoll - Add Interactive Polls to PowerPoint

Peer to Peer Training

The following staff members have graciously volunteered to assist colleagues with various software packages:

Access - Dave Auger
Adobe  -  Diane Ogren
Digital Portfolio  -  Heather Bigelow

eSchool  -  Dave Auger
Excel  -  Dave Auger / Linda Garbellano

Outlook  -  Barb Burnham / Jim Haas

Photo Shop  -  Wendy Cotter

Power Point  -  Barb Burnham

Publisher -  Jim Haas

Please contact them directly for assistance at a mutually agreeable time. If you need assistance with something that is not listed above, please let us know and we can arrange for someone to help.

MS Outlook Training Materials

For those of you who have the "Client Version" of MS Outlook, I will be periodically posting information from a training session put on by NERIC.  They have graciously given permission to pass this information on to you. 

Please NOTE: This information is for the CLIENT VERSION (Full version) of Outlook.  Information provided will look very different if you are using the WEB Version.

Part 1                                           OUTLOOK 2010 [CLIENT Version]

Scheduling Appointments

Schedule an appointment in Outlook’s calendar when you would like to block out time on your calendar for yourself. You do not schedule an appointment when you want to invite others or resources.

1) Select the Home tab.

2) Choose New Items from the New group and then Appointment or

      Double-click in a time slot in your calendar to open the Appointment window.

3) Enter your appointment details:

       Subject, Location, Start time and End time

       Check All day event, if appropriate.

4) If necessary, type additional details about the appointment and key information in the blank workspace.

5) Select Save and Close in the Actions group on the Appointment tab.

Note: You may drag an email from your Inbox and drop it into your Calendar to schedule an Appointment. The easiest way to do this is to:


1) Right-click on the Calendar in the Task Pane and then choose Open in New Window.

2) Resize your Calendar window so it’s smaller so it’s smaller.

3) Drag an email message from your Inbox and drop it into a free time slot in your Calendar.

4) The Subject of your email will become the Subject of your Appointment.

5) Fill-in the rest of the info for the Appointment.

 

Welcome to the New School Year

TECH COMMITTEE HAPPENINGS

The Technology Committee has decided to start using this forum as a resource for staff technology information.  Information will be updated regularly so check back often.

Below is some information from the Technology Committee:

-          Peer to peer Professional Development will be found here on the Tech Blog. This is an opportunity to learn more about certain technologies/software from our own staff, on your own schedule.

-          Gathering of data from the student technology surveys.  This information will be used to target weaknesses within each class and campus wide.  We will also be adjusting our survey based on some feedback we have received.    

-          We have begun searching for various conferences which may be attended by students.  Any opportunities will be passed along to you.

-          A staff survey on technology usage will be sent out shortly.  These will only take a couple minutes of your time and are important for us to compare to our baseline data from last year.  The Professional Development Committee will use this data to help plan future staff PD.

Free Textbooks

Bookboon is a free service offering free full-length textbooks, travel guides, and business books in digital form. The textbook section of Bookboon offers more than 500 digital textbooks. On Bookboon there are etextbooks available for twenty-five subjects, but the bulk of the etextbooks are focused on Economics, Engineering, and IT. You can browse the title lists to find a book you want or you can search Bookboon by keyword. Bookboon hosts books written in five languages. All of the books are free to download. The only catch is that you have to provide an email address before you can download the books.

I just downloaded the full text on Office 2010. Check it out!

What is that wierd box I see?

That weird box you are starting to see that looks like a cross between a puzzle and a bar code is actually called a QR code (short for Quick Response) is a specific matrix bar code, readable by dedicated QR bar code readers, smart phones, and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arraigned in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, a URL or other data.

QR codes storing addresses and URL's may appear in magazines, on signs, in stores and supermarkets, business cards, website or on just about any object which users might need information. Users with a smart or camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone's browser.

There are many free, easy to use sites available for creating QR codes on such is http://createqrcode.appspot.com/

Bit.ly

Think about the last time you tried to get all the students in your classroom on the same webpage at the same time. How long did it take to make that happen?

If the URL (short for Uniform Resource Locator) for that page was something like this http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22C6LEW85F/ (CTE Sr Survey) and you wrote it on the whiteboard in your room or you projected it on a screen, it probably took longer than you would have liked to get every student on that page.

There is and easy-to-use tool to fix that problem and it is called Bit.ly.

Bit.ly is a URL shortening service. Anytime you have a long, complicated URL you can use Bit.ly to shorten it down to something much more manageable.

You can create a free Bit.ly account you can customize your shortened URL to make it even more manageable.

For example, it's far easier for me to direct people to http://bit.ly/dKSQZd than it is to http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22C6L3EW85F/. You can use Bit.ly by copying a URL and pasting it into Bit.ly.

Try Bit.ly the next time you're setting up a lesson plan that requires all of your students to enter a long complicated URL.

You can find the link to Bit.ly below and over to the right under Cool Free Stuff.

http://bit.ly/