PowerPoint Tips

PowerPoint is one of the most frequently used applications in education.  Its prevalence can be attributed to its balance of power and ease of use.  However, there are certain functions that regularly cause users grief, and, as Elearning Catalyst Teachers, we often find ourselves answering the same questions to address these frustrations.

This post will provide links to tutorial material which a addresses a handful of these common issues.  These are all video tutorials which walk the user through the process involved.  Some of these tutorials are located on the Chinook SD Student Moodle server.  When prompted for a login, simply click the "Login as Guest" button.

• How to create a entire picture slideshow (regardless of size) in 7 mouse clicks
• How to reduce the file size of a PowerPoint presentation
• Embedding a Youtube video in a PP presentation
• Converting Youtube video and inserting it into PowerPoint
• Combining multiple PowerPoint presentations without losing formatting

If you have your own questions or issues regarding PowerPoint, don't hesitate to contact your Elearning Catalyst Teacher.

Popular Science Archives Online for Free

Fans of Popular Science magazine may be intrigued to know that it has recently partnered with Google Books to provide a complete online archive of past issues for free.  The archive is searchable by keyword(s), although there is no advanced search feature.

Articles appear in full colour as they did in the original magazine, complete with all graphics, and with the user's search terms highlighted.  I would have preferred the choice of popping out an article into a new window to make it easier to read.  As it is, the article appears within the fixed-width framework of the page, so the user is faced with the choice of zooming in within the web page, which pushes some of the article out of view, or zooming in within her browser, which may not be an option for folks with lower resolution monitors.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting development which runs counter to a number of recent corporate decisions, including the New York Times choice to limit the number of articles that users can view for free before requiring a subscription.

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.