Tech Tips for the Week of October 26th - Photostory

This Week's Tip:  Photostory 3

An old adage cautions that "There's no such thing as a free lunch."  Like all truisms and generalizations, this one is only partially true.  Certainly, in the realm of computer software, there are many quality products available for free.  Last week's Tech Tips focused on free software to protect your computer from viruses.  This week's free software recommendation takes us in a completely different direction - creating a photo slideshow.

Tech Tips for the Week of October 19th - Free Anti-virus

Expanded Distribution

This week I've expanded the list of folks who receive this email to include the ELT group, as I received some requests from this group to be included in this mail-out. As well, I have had some requests to include some EA's in my mailing list, so I have added them as individuals. If you have folks within your schools or offices who are interested in receiving these weekly emails, please let me know, and I will add them to my list.

Tech Tips for the Week of October 13th - Password Security, Chinoowiki

Tip 1: Password Security: October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and, as if to punctuate that declaration, some recent events have brought into stark relief the importance of keeping our private information private. While Internet transactions are, as a rule, quite secure, their safety and security can easily be compromised by poor decisions on our part, in particular, insecure password choices. In my days as a Tech Coordinator, I sometimes found myself needing to log on to a staff member's network account to perform some troubleshooting. All too often, I didn't have to ask the staff member to log on for me, because I was able, after two or three attempts, to guess his/her password. This Gmail Blog post covers a number of strategies for keeping your passwords - and you personal information - secure.

Tech Tips for the week of October 5 - Google Calendar

Teachers are a busy lot, who often find themselves trying to keep track of the many commitments they have in their professional, extra-curricular, and personal lives. This week's tech tip highlights a tool to help teachers, or anyone else, manage their complex schedules, Google Calendar.

Tech Tips for the Week of September 28 - CIA World Factbook, Estat, Excel

First as a follow-up to last week's Tech Tip, my colleague Rob Geiger pointed out that my video on using the Format Painter had neglected to draw attention to the benefits of double-clicking on the Format Painter button. Double-clicking essentially "locks" the Format Painter in an "on" state so that you can swipe the Format Painter cursor across multiple selections, copying the format of your original cursor position. When you are done applying formatting in this way, clicking on the Format Painter button again turns it "off." Thanks, Rob.

In this week's Tech Tip, I would like to draw your attention to two great information resources for Social Studies teachers and a powerful tool for managing and understanding the information gleaned from those resources.

Tech Tips for the Week of September 21 - MS Word

In conversations I've had within the last week, I'm reminded that sometimes folks may be unfamiliar with some of the more fundamental abilities of Microsoft Word, features which can simplify common, everyday tasks in education. To address this gap, I've put together three video tutorials to introduce (or reinforce) people's knowledge of some of MS Word's underutilized features:

• Using the Format Painter and Autostyles to Simplify Repeated Formatting
• Placing and Handling Graphics in MS Word
  
• Using Automatic Numbering and Bulleting in Word 2003

Tech Tips for the week of September 14 - Email Filters, Gmail

True to last week's promise, this week's tech tips will show you how to create email filters within the Chinook email system; however I have a few other items first.

1. Inspiration follow-up: Further to last week's Inspiration tech tip, in a conversation with one of our division Project CRISS leaders, I was asked if Inspiration could handle/generate outlines in "Power Outline" form, one of the concepts of organization central to the CRISS methodology. As a matter of fact, Inspiration can generate power outlines, although it does not do so by default. This makes Inspiration an even more valuable tool to support one of our literacy initiatives. To switch to power outlining in Inspiration:
1. Switch to outline mode by clicking on outline on the toolbar.
2. From the menu, select outline
3. Then prefix labels
4. And finally, power outlining
   Your outline will now be in Power Outline format.
   
   
2. A note to Moodle users: For those of you who use Moodle with your face-to-face students, we would like to pass on a reminder to un-enrol students from previous years' courses. This will prevent students from having to wade through a long list of "dead" courses in their Moodle home page.
   

Tech Tips for the Week of September 9 - Inspiration

First, let me introduce myself to those of you who may not know me. My name is Cal Deobald, an Elearning Catalyst teacher with Chinook School Division. My primary assignment is working with the schools in the southwest area of the division, but this year I have also assumed duties for leading and organizing professional development provided by the Elearning team.

In this second capacity, I have committed to providing tech tips via regular emails to all teachers in the division. My goal is to accomplish this weekly. We'll see how that goes. ;-)

The goal of my first tech tip is to ensure that all teachers in the division are aware of Inspiration and its possibilities within the classroom.