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TechTips

Converting PDF to Text

One of the terrible things about creating a presentation? You mix all this text, media into a container that can be hard to process by AI. Some might not want to do that, and I und

File Explorers: Android and iOS

Sitting at lunch with some colleagues, our conversation drifted to how to get music and other content onto an iPhone. This came up because they were trying to transition from Andro

Backing Up Everything

Since my exodus from Google Drive as my ultimate storage solution (I only rely on it now for portable documents and shared content, less than 3 gigs total used), I make it a habit

Background Removal

Wouldn't it be awesome to remove your background, slip into the future without all your baggage and old background clinging to you? Well, Erase.bg offers to do that for your pictur

Bare Bones Email Program

One of my favorite email programs, Mozilla Thunderbird, takes up about 1.5 gigs on my hard drive. That's not that much, really, but what if I had a smaller alternative program? Sma

Fixing my Grub

If you dual boot Windows and GNU/Linux, you'll soon find yourself wishing you could customize your grub file. This is a list of operating systems/kernels on your computer that you

Exodus: Google Photos

Google's recent announcements about Google Photos reminded me that it's important to have an exit policy. Google's dominance over my email, photo storage, and file storage reminded

Make Text Bigger

Did you read my TCEA blog entry on making text bigger on the screen? Facilitating a session in San Angelo, I took advantage of a few ways to share my resource links with others. Th

Trimming Tabs on Firefox Quantum

After returning to Firefox as my default browser (and keeping a copy of Torch Browser around for Chrome compatibility, etc), I found myself wanting to banish the tab bar that has b

Managing Your Chrome Add-Ons

This is a test...the screen for this blog entry should be blank, but if viewed in an RSS reader, all the content appears. : ) These add on managers not only allow you to disable or

Apple TV Grumblings

When I first bought my Apple TV (approx $100), I remember being excited about the possibilities. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I bought a Chromecast for small portion

Teleprompter Needed?

There are a million uses for teleprompters in every and any situation you can think of. In fact, if I could, I'd have a teleprompter every time I spoke to a large group. It's quite

Looking for Jobs

If you’re an American educator, then chances are you have applied for different jobs in various school districts. Aside from the value inherent in the process of getting to kno

Forget the Potential

"I probably flunked it," shared Paul to a group of his high school peers. We were clustered around him, commiserating about the latest Chemistry exam. Paul looked like he wasn't go

Automating FTP Transfers

If you are a school district, there are times when you have to transfer files securely often, encrypted from one location to another. It's tempting to want to use built in utilit

Disconnected? Try EasyTetherPro!

Yesterday evening, 10 minutes prior to the start of the Weekly Webinar Series a collaborative effort between 2 school districts and one organization my internet wasn't working. Y

Looking for Books

"I want to fill my room with books," shared a friend of my daughter. "Do you have any you want to get rid of?" [ ![](

Presentation Setup for #iPad

I am a national presenter and use air server to show my ipad on the big screen for demonstrating apps. Is there any reason why I would want appleTV instead? I often present in ho

Favorite #iPad Apps

Over the last year, I've had the opportunity to work with lots of different iPad apps. I've spent lots of money (about $200) on all the different paid apps, as well as some that I

Uploading Pictures

Recently, someone on the GCT list shared this problem: We had our official school opening today (yay) and have photo's from all sorts of places. I haven't used Picasa for quite a

Low Cost Portable USB Drives

A colleague recently asked me, Where can I get a good deal for a portable USB drive so I can back up my data? Apparently, the local server had crashed and taken a lot of her data

GoogleVideo is Going Away

Some news in my inbox today...I guess I have some video moving to do! Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Vide

@SugarSync Reflections

Now that I've been using SugarSync for a few days, I have some reflections to share. Nothing earth shattering but.... 1. The File Manager just gets in the way. On UbuntuLinux, it d

Plurking from Your Android Phone

After some disappointment with the various Plurking tools on my Android phone PlurQ , Pluroid I decided to just be a plurker from the Opera browser on my Android phone. Today,

Password Breach

This morning, I received the following email: This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media's servers were compromised, resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker , Gizmodo

Dealing with Yahoo Email

Get spammed lately? I was. Here's the email apology from the person whose Yahoo email account was "possessed": I guess I am getting spamed I contacted Yahoo! and have run scans

Uploading Folders to GoogleDocs

One of the main complaints about GoogleDocs is, "I bought gigabytes of storage on GoogleDocs, but now I find out I have to upload files, rather than folders?" It's a valid complain

Collating Multiple RSS Feeds

Though I should be asleep, I was curious how to get the RSS feed for my Plurk account, which I also do for my Twitter account. Having an RSS feed for my social media allow me to ac

Meeting Wallwisher

I've never used WallWisher.com, but found out that one of the teachers in my District was using it. This was a fascinating tool to use. Of course, now that I'm sensitized to it, I'

Speeding Up OS X Snow Leopard

On my now "old" Macbook running 2gigs of RAM and Snow Leopard, I found that it had slowed down considerably since I installed OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, I have never reformatted t

AntiVirus Startups

A colleague recently dropped his computer off to me and asked me to clean it out for him. While it would have been a simple matter to reformat the hard drive, I found myself lookin

Animation Software

This request for information landed in my inbox: Does anyone have a suggestion for some free animation software. We are doing Claymations and I have used PowerPoint and Flash in th

Remove Apps on iPod Touch

We are using iPod touched in the classroom. Is there a way to remove the Apps button on the iPod home screen so that students cannot browse apps at the touch of a button? I h

Convert Ext3 to Ext4

Although some have complained that Ext4 isn't exactly perfect, I took the plunge on an external drive yesterday and followed these instructions to convert Ext3 formatted drive to E

Re-Discovering Miro

This evening, I've been re discovering Miro, an easy to use portal to a variety of rich media content. Not being an iTunes fanatic in fact, it's too dog

Jing SWF into PBWorks Wiki

Want to embed Jing created SWFs in your PBWorks Wiki page? If so, then you need to read this! Earlier today, the question came up, how can you embed Jing created SWF which is what

Bootable Leopard OS X Flash Drive

As I shared before, I needed a bootable Mac OS X Leopard USB Flash drive. Booting up from a DVD takes too long, but an 8gig flash drive works just fine (a 16gig or bigger is nice,

Virtualization

Check out this presentation by Steve Young at the Texas CTO Clinic 2009 on virtualization.... [Tx K12 Cto Clinic Virtualization Presentation](

Dealing with Home Computers

How does everyone deal with employee's asking you to "update" or "load" software on their home computers that they bring in for you to work on (without checking first) and sinc

Picasa 101

When I first installed Picasa on my computers, I was delighted to see such a powerful tool made available as an alternative to iPhoto. Now, [Jim Henderson (MakeUseOf.com)](

Clock Link

While it's always dangerous to post embed external code in a site since that slows your page down if the host site is having problems or there is a slow connection I like [this t

YouTube Uploader

Thanks to a tweet, I saw this: YouTube Uploader Adobe AIR Application that lets you create Overlays w/o browser [

HelpDesk Software

A few colleagues were looking for HelpDesk solution. One wrote: I am wondering what software anyone is using for help desks, i.e. ticket tracking, user ticket creation, etc.

PDF to Word Converter

Worth checking out... Some PDF to Word Converter can help you to convert pdf to word doc and pdf to rtf, so you can edit and reuse your PDF content. Using Some PDF to Word Conver

PmWiki Skins

I was playing around with Patrick Michaud's PmWiki quite a bit yesterday trying to add a GUI editor like FCKedit (btw, a bit of trivia I picked up..."FCK" are

19 Open Source Tools

I'm fascinated by free, open source tools, especially for their application in K 12 education settings. Here are a few of the ones that jump out at me as potentially useful in K 12

phpScheduleIt

A campus level person asked, "How can teachers in my grade level best schedule ourselves and students into 2 classrooms using some kind of web based calendaring system?" The soluti

Backing Up Everything

Cheryl Oakes points out the following... This is a two part blog post, I am beginning the post at and on Thur

Bulk Emailing Xmas Cards

Earlier today, I received an email from a dear friend. I truly enjoyed seeing pictures of his family and all the activities they had engaged in for the 2008 school year. One piece

Tweet Troubles

After upgrading to Adobe Air 1.5 on UbuntuLinux 8.10, TweetDeck stopped working. I tried to reinstall but received this error: Sorry, an error has occurre

Internet Explorer Exploit

The security flaw in Internet Explorer has a few folks scrambling. One of the questions going around in my head is, "Does this flaw affect IE browser on computers where the user do

Remote Control of Student PCs

Two days ago, I received this inquiry: We are looking at a program (hopefully free) that allows the instructor to view the computers in a lab setting (LAN) and if necessary proje

Blu-Ray Problem

What's the problem? I don't have a blu ray player and no plans to get one right away. Why? The price is out of budget. And, instead of spending money on DVDs for family members' st

CD/DVD-Burning Software

Built in Windows CD/DVD burning software doesn't always work smoothly. Even though you can buy Nero or Roxio, you don't really need to. Here are 3 programs I've used that have work

Anatomy of an OPML

With 164 blogs and more coming online we're using an Apple Blog/Wiki xServe every day, I'm tempted to do a victory dance (don't count on it). One of the challenges is keeping up

Handy Windows Tools from ZDnet

One of my team members shared this list of programs from ZD net with me and said, "For Download a la Mode," but I'm wondering if he really didn't just want me to read this article,

Abundance of Tools

A colleague dropped by and bragged that he’d heard from a student in college. “Yeah, she made an ‘A’ in her project because she could create a web page!” I laughed and said, “Didn’

Moodle Book Module

This next week, I'll have the opportunity to work with various educational leaders. To prepare for that conferenc

Survey Tools

Ever had to collect a lot of information from campuses, wanted to do it electronically, but instead ended up with lots of emails flying back and forth with Word or Excel spreadshee

Twitter - Educational Apps

This past week, I found myself sharing Twitter as an educational app, a way to tap into the network of learners around the globe. Here are some of the Twitterapps that really caugh

Flickr RSS Feed

Tom Barrett asked: Does anyone know how to create an RSS feed for an image search in Flickr? The answer is pretty straightforward...

PDFtools

Although 99% of what I do with PDF files is to create them, I'm occasionally called upon to manipulate them, whether to delete pages, merge PDF documents, and stuff like that. On t