Zamzar to the Rescue for File Opening Issues

Are your students having difficulties opening files from home at school?

It is very important to remind students to save word processing documents as .doc or .rtf as other file formats will not open at school.

.docx and .pptx files will not open at school.

Encourage students to carry flash drives and have email accounts to facilitate the transfer of data between home and school.

If all else fails, direct them to Zamzar.
Zamzar is a free file conversion site.

I have introduced many students to this site and found it extremely helpful.

If anyone has any other tips, pass them along!

Online Research Databases - Reliable Research Info in a Click

When MIA, I have been learning more about online research databases and giving workshops around the Lower Mainland. We have access to a couple of fabulous, reliable online research databases. World Book Online, EBSCO Research Databases, and the Encyclopedia of British Columbia Online. World Book offline you are familiar with, but there a lot of extras in the online version. World Book has incorporated primary source documents, maps, timelines and e-books. World Book has also incorporated Canadian Sources. I was very pleased to see among the 24 Canadian e-book titles Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver and Robert Service's The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses.

EBSCO Research Databases include 1,750 periodicals, 8,300 journals, 100,000 primary source documents, 300,000 photos, maps and flags and 520 full text education journals. The Canadian Student Reference Centre has full text for many magazines as well as thousands of historical essays and biographies. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator. It also includes over 100,000 primary source materials and more than 300,000 images.

For teacher reference, EBSCO includes over 260 titles of teacher and administrator journals, periodicals, and books covering education topics such as Assessment, Continuing Education, Current Pedagogical Research, Curriculum Development, Instructional Media, Language Arts, Literacy Standards, Science & Mathematics, and more.

Access in the school is automatic. Drop by the library for the passwords for at home access - our license allows for this.

Please encourage our students to go beyond Google and Wikipedia to use these databases - make it an assignment requirement. It will be databases such as these our students will be accessing in post secondary education and at the public library.

I'd be happy to come and do an intro lesson with your class - fyi all the grade 8's become familiar with World Book Online during orientation.

Check out the video about Online Databases, you might recognize a few familiar faces... our students were great... I'm not a fan of being on camera;)

Paperless Classroom Challenge

Here's some follow up information to the Paperless Classroom Challenge I proposed at last week's prod.

The idea of a paperless classroom challenge was bantered around last year between Lesley, Bryan, Audrey and I. Given our extraordinary photocopying costs last year, I thought it would be an interesting idea to float for two months - November and April.

The idea came to Lesley and Bryan through a blog they read.
Educator Shelly Blake-Plock writes about the paperless classroom on his blog TeachPaperless.

A few posts from his blog you might find interesting as an introduction to the paperless classroom concept:
I Was a Paper Junkie
Cost Benefits of Going Paperless
At the End of the Anomaly of the Age of Printed Books

Have no fear, the later is not about giving up books, it is about how information is printed today!

The Paperless Classroom, written by a San Diego State University graduate student, offers a good overview of the pros and cons of going paperless, and offers links to other resources.

We are fortunate to have the technology at Sutherland to take a stab at going paperless.

Think about a unit, a lesson, a presentation, a student assessment option that could be given paperless - plan to reduce your paper use in November and April. Think about adopting a speedgeeking application to assist with your paperless goals or revisiting the pdf scanner to digitize your already fabulously created lessons and exercises.

Plan for a paperless November and April!!!

Speedgeeking Start Up

Let's begin where we ended in June!

Last week the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies in the UK posted its list of 100 Top Tools for Learning compiled from learning professionals worldwide.

At our Speedgeeking session back in June you were introduced to applications found in the top 10 of the survey.

Now that we are back, which application would you like to spend some time getting to know this year - Google apps, Delicious, Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, or Skype?

You can revisit the speedgeeking handouts in a couple of locations. The info handouts are still in the Novacom Sutherland staff conference. I am also in the beginning stages of creating a wiki for the library - you can link here to the Staff Stuff and scroll down to the bottom for the handhouts.

Those of you who put your speedgeeking introductions firmly on the summer back burner, see if you can move one forward into this school year.

Happy to help you get reintroduced to your speedgeeking date.


Graphic used under Creative Commons license by Daniel F. Pigatto http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigatto/332193181/