Using a Toshiba Photocopier to Scan Documents to PDF Files

If you've ever wanted to send a print document quickly to someone at a distance, you may be interested to know that your school photocopier provides a solution.  Most Chinook schools now have Toshiba photocopiers, and most of these photocopiers have the ability to scan print documents to PDF files.

More on Password Security

A few weeks ago, I told a story of my brush with identity theft and posted some advice on online security.  Then, a few days ago, Marion Dueck at SCCHS brought this article to my attention.  It provides some interesting statistics on how easily certain kinds of passwords can be compromised.

For those who may not have the time or inclination to read the article (although doing so would be well worth your time) its primary conclusion is that we should re-think the idea of a password and instead consider using a pass-phrase.  Simply by adopting a combination of three uncommon words as our pass-phrase, we could increase the time it would take a determined hacker to breach an account to millions of years.  That would seem to be an adequate level of security.  ;-)

After my recent brush with phishing and identity theft I changed all my passwords, which was no small feat.  Now I'm tempted to go through all that pain again.  Sigh ...

Thanks a lot, Marion!

Generating PDF Documents - Followup

As a follow-up to my earlier post on generating PDF documents, my colleague Derek Murdoch at SCCHS brought another solution to my attention.  PDFmyURL.com specializes in creating a PDF document out of any web page.  Simply copy the URL (web address) of any page you are viewing and paste into the PDFmyURL.com web site.  It very quickly generates a PDF file and prompts the user to download the result.

My cursory experimentation with the site showed some odd formatting of headings, but the body text of the web page formatted quite nicely.  A utility like this is especially useful when dealing with dynamic web content that can change from day to day.  In these instances, sending someone the URL can prove futile because they will not see the same content you did when you visited the site.

Thanks, Derek, for that tip.

Using Internet Bandwidth Responsibly

As we rely more and more on the Internet for our communication, daily interactions and research, having a reliable, fast Internet connections in school becomes increasingly important.  At one time we might want to have reliable Internet access in our schools; today we need it.

It stands to reason, then, that if we rely on something so much, we should treat it well and use it responsibly.  We do this with our cars, our home heating systems, and anything else we deem essential in our lives.  And, when we share a resource with others who need it as well, it becomes doubly important that we treat it well so that we don't have a negative impact on those around us.

Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen with school Internet connections.

Creating and Managing Your Own PDFs With Free Software

Creating PDF's with Free Software

Anyone who has downloaded a document from the Internet is probably aware of the PDF document format, a format that was created by Adobe Software, which allows users to create documents that can be viewed on many different platforms.  The strength of the PDF format is that the reproduction will always look exactly like the original.

If I send a Word document or Excel spreadsheet to someone, I must assume that they have Word or Excel to view the file.  These are expensive programs, and not everyone has them.  Furthermore, if the document is to look like my original, the recipient must also have exactly the same fonts installed on his/her computer as I have on mine.

Collecting, Analyzing and Graphing Data with Google Forms

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had several inquiries about ways to conduct online surveys and collect online data.  In each case, I've pointed people towards Google Docs and its Google Forms feature.