Get Your "Inspiration" Online

Many educators are familiar with the power of Inspiration as a tool for brainstorming, visualizing, and organizing ideas.  However, fewer people know that the folks at Inspiration have been at work bringing those same capabilities to the web.  Mywebspiration.com is an online service which allows users to create Inspiration webs and outlines directly within their web browser and save the files online.

Updating Documents on Your School Web Site without Breaking Links

This blog entry is specifically targeted at Chinook administrators, office managers, or any others who may be responsible for editing their school's web site.

This fall, you will want to update a number of documents on your web site - things like student handbooks, ...  The problem is that if you upload a new document, you will also need to change/update any links to that document on your school web pages.  The video tutorial below shows you how to update the document in a way that negates having to update links as well.  Because links connect to an ID number for a document, you can actually change the document title and the document name without breaking any hyperlinks associated with it.

Here's how ...



OR, watch this video at youtube.com.

Portable Apps - Carry All Your Software in Your Pocket

In several posts in the past, I have mentioned portable versions of software.  Portable software titles are specially designed to be self-contained so that they can be run directly without any installation process.  This means that the user can place the program file/folder on any memory device (USB thumb drive, SD card, portable hard drive) connect that device to any Windows Machine and run the program, complete with saved preferences.  Portable software is usually limited to open source or other free packages, but this is not necessarily a huge limitation.

Portable Apps are the ideal solution for folks who may not be able to afford a laptop or may not want to be burdened by carrying one around.  The recent increases in storage capacity for USB thumb drives mean that you can easily carry all your applications and all your data on a $50 device smaller than a pack of gum.  Planning on travelling this summer?  Take along your Internet browser (complete with all your favourites/bookmarks), your email client (pre-configured), your photo editor, your music and a media player, even a copy of Skype to phone home with.  Then, to play it safe, transfer all your photos to your thumb drive so that you have backup copies should something happen to your camera.

Gmail Adds Drag-and-Drop Attachments

Good news for those who use Gmail.  Google recently added the ability to drag and drop attachments into the compose window within Gmail.  This is particularly useful for multiple attachments, which used to require browsing for each individual file to be attached.  Now a user can open a folder window, CTRL-click on as many files as he/she wants to attach, and drag them all to the area just above the editing portion of the Gmail message.

Google Docs Revamped, Drawing App Added

Many folks are aware of the benefits of Google Docs as a collaboration and sharing platform.  Recently Google announced a number of enhancements which make it an even more powerful tool for collaboration. You can catch up on the enhancements by reading my overview below, or you can view this video summary.



New additions include:

• Improved import of documents created in MS Word and other stand-alone word processors.
• Ruler, margins, tabs, and floating images in text documents
• A full-featured comment system for co-editing documents
• Improved "real-time" updating of co-editors changes
• The spreadsheet application now displays the formula bar by default and allows autofill and drag-and-drop column moving
• A new drawing application has been added to the suite.  While you're probably not going to use it to draw the blueprints for your new house, it is quite capable for charts, simple drawings, schematics and flowcharts
• In all applications, a collaboration sidebar now allows you to chat with co-editors while working on the document.

Using Photostory to Create Historical Documentaries

I have already extolled the virtues of Microsoft Photostory in a previous post, so I won't go into exhaustive detail about the program itself.  Instead, this post will focus on curricular applications for Photostory.

For those unfamiliar with the program, Photostory, available as a free download from Microsoft, allows users to create sophisticated photo slideshows quickly and easily.  Its interface is simple enough that even grade ones can master it, yet it provides enough depth for older students and adults.  For those interested in learning how to use Photostory, Elearning has created a number of video tutorials which walk the user through the process (click "log in as guest").