Adobe launches free web version of Photoshop

“The maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop on March 27 launched a basic version of the program available free of charge online.

Photoshop Express will be completely web-based, so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system, and browser. And, once they register, users can get to their accounts from different computers.

After signing up for the free service, users can upload their photos and then edit them with Adobe’s simplified set of point-and-click controls for removing “red eye,” cropping, adjusting the brightness and color saturation, and other functions. Users can group photos into online albums and can post them to popular social-networking sites, all from within the web-based program.”

http://www.photoshop.com/express

Recent Finds on the Internet

Each day, I get emails about websites and/or read about them in articles and blogs. I thought I would start trying to share my finds at least once a week. This week’s discoveries:

1. http://www.awesomeclipartforeducators.com/ – a site with FREE clipart, fonts, and worksheets for teachers
2. http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php – more FREE clipart
3. http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp -”The Newspaper Clipping Generator” … very cool site that takes your headline and text and makes a .jpg of a newspaper clipping
4. http://www.ctap10.org/tram – Technology Resources for Adopted Materials (TRAM) to support our reading and math series. If you attended the RCOE technology workshop on 4/28 or 5/5, this is the site they were using.

I hope these sites are useful for you. If you have a particular need for any type of sites, please comment below and I’ll see what I can find for you.

I was recently reading an article on a website called “DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS ” that I wanted to share with you:

The Need for Change

Not only has the world changed but students are not as they were in our day, the old days, or anytime within recent memory. Because they are different, teaching and learning must also be different.

The Pew Research Center released “A Portrait of Generation Next.” In it, they conclude, “A new generation has come of age, shaped by an unprecedented revolution in technology and dramatic events both at home and abroad. They are more comfortable with globalization and new ways of doing work. They are the most likely of any age group to say that automation, the outsourcing of jobs, and the growing number of immigrants have helped and not hurt American workers. Asked about the life goals of those in their age group, most Gen Nexters say their generation’s top goals are “fortune and fame.”

In their report “Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation,” Pew researchers state, “The number of teenagers using the Internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online, and more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking.” See more data in the sidebar below.

Teens and the Internet

The vast majority of teens in the United States, 87% of those aged 12 to 17, now use the Internet. That amounts to about 21 million youth who use the internet, up from roughly 17 million when we surveyed this age cohort in late 2000. Not only has the wired share of the teenage population grown, but teens’ use of the internet has intensified. Teenagers now use the internet more often and in a greater variety of ways than they did in 2000. There are now approximately 11 million teens who go online daily, compared to about 7 million in 2000.

• 87% of U.S. teens aged 12-17 use the internet, up from 73% in 2000. By contrast,
• 66% of adults use the internet, up from 56% in 2000.
• 51% of teenage internet users say they go online on a daily basis, up from 42% in
• 2000.

At the same time, the scope of teens’ online lives has also broadened. One out of every two teens who use the internet lives in a home with a broadband connection. Wired teens are more frequent users of instant messaging. And they are now more likely to play games online, make purchases, get news, and seek health information.
• 81% of teen Internet users play games online. That represents about 17 million people and signifies growth of 52% in the number of online gamers since 2000.
• 76% get news online. That represents about 16 million people and signifies growth of 38% in the number of teens getting news online since 2000.
• 43% have made purchases online. That represents about 9 million people and signifies growth of 71% in teen online shoppers since 2000.
• 31% use the Internet to get health information. That represents about 6 million people and signifies growth of 47% in the number of teens using the internet this way since 2000. – From Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation – http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Tech_July2005web.pdf

This article helps reinforce what many of us already know – the way we learned to teach ten (or more) years ago is not the way most students learn today. We are not going to change the way they learn, so we will have to take articles like this one, digest the facts, and adjust our teaching methods accordingly.

Food for thought ….

Office 2003 and opening .DOCX files

If you have MS Office 2003 installed on your computer, like most of us do, you may run into the problem that I did when I was emailed a file with the “.docx” extension. When I tried to open it, MS Word 2003 did not know how to open it.

It turns out that this file extension (with the trailing ‘x’) is a new format that is part of MS Office 2007. To open files in MS Office 2003 with the “x” (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), you will need to download and install the program FileFormatConverters.exe from the Microsoft website. This download will add the capability to open MS Office 2007 files from Office 2003. You might not get the full impact of some of Office 2007′s new features, but you will be able to open, edit, and/or print the document.

Auto Save Documents in MS Office applications

If you have ever lost an MS Office document when your program crashes, or your computer accidentally loses power, and you haven’t saved the latest revision, the directions for setting AutoRecovery are listed below:

1. On the Tools menu (of each application), click Options, and then click the Save tab.
2. Select the “Save AutoRecover info every” check box.
3. In the minutes box, specify how often you want your Microsoft Office program to save files.

AutoRecovery is NOT a backup copy or a normal saved copy. Setting “AutoRecover” does not replace the Save command. You should use the Save command to save your document at regular intervals and when you finish working on it. If you exit the program and do not tell it to save the open file, then there is no way to recover the document.

To save a document, you can go to the “File” menu, click the floppy disk icon, or type “Ctrl-S”.

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If you are a true MS Office aficionado, and know how to work with macros, the website below has a macro you might try for a true autosave option.

http://wordtips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T0071_A_Real_AutoSave.html

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I hope everyone has a great holiday and vacation! Great chance to recharge your internal batteries!

Using Your Digital Camera: A Guide To Great Photographs

When someone says “technology”, most of us think computers. There are other types of technology at the school site. Digital cameras, telephones, faxes, and bell systems are just some of the other technology that is covered in the tech plan.

For those that want to learn more about taking good digital photos, I found a great on-line book you might want to check out. Here is a selection from the preface:

A great photograph begins when you recognize a great scene or subject. But recognizing a great opportunity isn’t enough to capture it; you also have to be prepared. A large part of being prepared involves understanding your camera well enough to capture what you see the way you want to interpret it. Getting you prepared to see and capture great photographs is what this book is all about. It doesn’t matter if you are taking pictures for business or pleasure, there’s a lot here to help you get better results and more satisfaction from your photography. To get better, and possibly even great photographs, you need to understand both concepts and procedures; the “whys” and “hows” of photography.

Check the rest of the book at http://www.shortcourses.com/use/ They have a lot of beginner and more advanced tips.

On-Line Registration Success

It appears that our on-line registration for the upcoming Buy-Back day has been successful. We had 30+ people register on-line in the first 24 hours, and over 50 in the first 2 days! As promised, here are the contest winners:

• 1^st teacher to register on-line (by 2 min) – Brian K.
• 2^nd teacher to register on-line – Jessica B.
• 3^rd teacher to register on-line – Erin O.
• First administrator to register on-line (3^rd overall) was Ann K.

Each teacher listed above has won a 30 minute “Paid Vacation”. Paid vacations are when I will come take over your class for that amount of time while you relax in the staff lounge or whatever constitutes a vacation for you (subject to your principal’s approval). More details to follow. Look forward to another on-line registration (with prizes!) for the Buy-Back day on December 1^st.

HM Lesson Planner Update

I recently discovered there is an update to the Houghton-Mifflin lesson planner CD. You can click on http://www.eduplace.com/lessonplanner/rdgdownloads/menus/ca_rdgtnc.html and choose your grade and operating system (Windows for most of you). Download, run, and let me know how it is. You can download this program to any computer, but it will ONLY install the update on a computer that already has the HM Lesson Planner installed.
Have a great weekend!

P.S. The first person to let me know how the update went on their PC will get a prize!

Nine Excellent Reasons for Technology in Education

An article from TechLearning.com by John Page that I would like to share with you. This is a truncated version. For the full article and explanation of each reason, CLICK HERE.

Nine Excellent Reasons for Technology in Education

Two events prodded me to write this. The first was my involvement in formulating a technology plan for a technologically advanced local school. During this process I became increasingly concerned that while the school intuitively knew it should improve in this area, it did not really know why.

The second event was an email I got from a teacher concerning my web site Math Open Reference. In it she said, to paraphrase: ‘Thank you so much! Now I have something to do with those laptops they gave me!.’ You can visualize the scene: a school decided to move technology into the classroom so it gave the teacher the computers. This is putting the solution before the problem. Again I wondered if this school really knew why they wanted the technology. In what way precisely would the education be better?

So here they are. Nine fundamental reasons why I think technology is important in education. Hopefully, they can act as the rationale for technology plans in schools. If you disagree, or find things missing, my contact information is at the end.

Reason 1. Expansion of time and place

Reason 2. Depth of Understanding

Reason 3. Learning vs. Teaching

Reason 4. New media for self-expression

Reason 5. Collaboration

Reason 6. Going Global

Reason 7. Individual pacing and sequence

Reason 8. Weight

Reason 9. Personal Productivity

October Already?

Here we are in the month of October already! Time is just flying by.

I wanted to update you on a few things. First, recent additions to our website include a District School Boundary Map and an Address Lookup link. The address lookup allows parents (or anyone) to type in the street number and street name (local only), and they get back the assigned elementary, middle school, and high school for that address. You may have seen the same thing on Perris Union High School District’s website. You can find both of these links under the “Links” balloon on the district website. I hope to add pacing guides to the website soon!

Second, I would like to gather as much data as possible to help plan future technology staff development. To date, only 3 people have completed my PESD Technology Preference Survey found on the right side of this blog (thanks Garmon, Lorin, and Elaine). This information would REALLY help me do this planning. Keep an eye on that same area of the blog page for more. We are planning on trying an on-line registration option for the next Buy-Back Day on Oct. 20^th. The first 3 people that register for that event on-line will receive a gift from me.

Lastly, the OARS scanning of tests is going well. Teachers should expect a very short turn around time to have access to their class’s results. In case you have forgotten, you can click here for the PESD OARS page. The historical data is coming along slow on the transfer from EADMS, but we should eventually see all test data from previous years.

OTHER NOTES:

District email boxes can get full. If it gets full, you will NOT be able to receive new emails. I suggest that you occasionally (maybe once a month) go into your email and 1) delete messages that are not from this school year, 2) delete emails with attachments – especially large attachments, and 3) forward important emails that you want to keep to your personal email account (Yahoo, AOL, etc …).

Garmon has been sending me some good resources that you might want to visit:

On-line training for teachers – http://www.wiziq.com/

On-line file storage – http://public.box.net/. Garmon has started one for 4^th grade teachers at http://public.box.net/perris4. Check it out and maybe you’ll want to start a page for your grade!

If you have ANY tech questions, please contact me by email or at the Staff Development Office.

“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” – Confucius