What I’ve Discovered the Last Few Weeks:

Free Moodle hosting for educators.  A good option if you can’t set up your own Moodle server or your district is a bureaucracy.  Not sure how much control you have, but a nice option for the less technical.   Link

A nice way to edit photos online without installing software. Great for students where installing software is an issue.  Link

Recently installed Windows 7 build 7100 on my laptop.  It’s a faster, cleaner Vista.  Very nice to use.  Less headache than Vista and finally something worth abandoning XP for.  You can install it for free until March.  Best to do a clean install.  Link

Best Underhyped features of Windows 7.  Link

8 Ways to Build Websites (Not Blogs) for Free.  Link

Who’s blogging in the world of education?  Here’s a list of educators worth following.  Good to follow a few every once in a while and see if they have something useful to say.  I like Free Technology for Teachers and Cool Cat Teacher.  Link

A simple way to build videos online with your pictures and audio.  I can’t help thinking it’s Movie Maker for the web.   Link

I have been using a Macbook recently.  Though I cannot be nearly as productive on a Mac than a PC, I often find myself limited by the simplest operations.  This list of keyboard shortcuts has come in handy (including how to Print the Screen and delete text to the right of the cursor).  Link

Solutions to Teacher Questions:

1. Used OCRTerminal to convert PDF to Word document.  Limited number of conversions from this free service, but very easy to use.

2. Save option in Microsoft Excel where it automatically backs up your files at a regular basis.  If you accidentally crash or close your document, there is a location where files are backed up.  A teacher closed her file without saving.  You can see the Path from Tools–>Options–>Save

3. Printing screen on the Mac: (Shift Command 3)

4. Creating avatars using Voki.  Voki.com.  Then cropping them and uploading to Moodle courses for students.  Something I plan to do with all my classes.

5. I don’t know what I’d do without Audacity.  I used it for the Chinese and Spanish AP test recordings as well as many other recording projects.

6. I always hit a wall in terms of using hard drive based cameras and importing into editing software.  Finally, I found a solution in Sony Vegas 7.0 which allows you to import from a Recorded DVD (.VOB files).  I wish I had hours of time to discover these solutions.