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Quick Tech Tip. Did you know that you can draw on PowerPoint slides during your presentation? You can use your mouse if you don’t have a touchscreen. When you run your PowerPoint slides, in the bottom left corner of the screen are four hard-to-see transparent icons: Left arrow, pen, menu, right arrow. When you mouse over one of them, you can see it. In the image below is the pen. Clicking the pen icon calls up this menu. Click the pen to draw; click the highlighter to highlight. Change the ink color if you’d like. When you want to go back to the arrow, forRead More →

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Boomerang Calendar, a gmail addin, looks for date/time information in your incoming gmail messages, compares them against your Google Calendar entries, and lets you know if you’re free or not, and then lets you schedule a time. It also allows you to easily propose meeting times to individuals or groups. I sent this message to my gmail account. This is what it looked like when I opened it in gmail. Boomerang Calendar identified date/time information, and looked at those time slots in my Google Calendar. Green means I’m free, yellow means that the time is bumping up against another appointment, and red means I’m alreadyRead More →

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A couple months ago I wrote about a new tool that just launched. KeyRocket has grown up in that short time. Time for an update. Ready to learn some keyboard shortcuts for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook? Download KeyRocket, and you’ll have your own tutorial. As you work, KeyRocket recognizes when you use the toolbar and will suggest a keyboard shortcut to accomplish the same task. (Free for personal and non-commercial use; subscribe for $5/month for tech support and advanced setup with your business.) [Note: When KeyRocket first launched in beta, free users could only choose one of the four commonly used Microsoft Office tools.Read More →

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Quick Tech Tip. For goo.gl shortened URLS, did you know that you can get analytics by adding .info at the end of the goo.gl URL? It doesn’t even need to be the URL you shortened. Try it. Go to http://goo.gl/UGtpp.info (page will open in new window). You will see how many people have visited that link, when they visited, how they got there, which browser they used, which country they’re in, and which platform they used. It’s handy if, for example, you want to see how many of your students might be reading, or at least viewing/downloading what you’ve assigned. Remember, you can get URLsRead More →

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If you have Tegrity, Camtasia, or Camtasia’s lightweight little brother Jing, and you’re comfortable with those, no need to venture into new territory. Unless of course you are looking for a quick screen recorder without the bells and whistles with a 15 min. recording limit. (The Pro version gives you much more power at $15 per year.) Make sure your microphone is ready to go, then visit Screencast-o-Matic, and click “start recording.” No login needed. Say yes to any dialog boxes that might pop up. And then you will get this dotted box. Anything that is inside the box screencast-o-matic will record. To resize theRead More →

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[Update 5/21/2012: Dropquest deadline is June 2, 2012.  Check out Dropbox’s new “get space” page.] Last year Dropbox hosted a scavenger hunt of sorts that awarded players extra Dropbox space. They’re ready to launch the second incarnation. As you solve the puzzles, space is added to your Dropbox account. If you finish the hunt, you’re guaranteed at least 1GB of extra space. The first batch to finish get some additional prizes. 1st place (1) Dropbox employee hoodie, LIMITED EDITION Dropbox Hack Week t-shirt, Dropbox drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, invitation to help write the next Dropquest, 100 GB for life 2nd place (10) Dropbox employeeRead More →

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The newest Dropbox feature, made available to all on 4/23/2012, is “get link.” You no longer have to put content in a public folder to share it. Open your Dropbox folder, right click on the filename or folder (yes, I said folder!), and under “Dropbox” select “Get link”. Or if you’re accessing your files from the Dropbox.com website, mouse over any file or folder, then click the “Get link” icon. If you choose to share just a file, your file will open in your browser. Copy the URL from your browser to share with whomever you’d like. The recipients can view the file in theRead More →

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[Update 6/6/2012 : See this newer blog post on KeyRocket.] I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts. A few months ago I wrote a blog post on Shortmarks, a service that lets you create shortcuts to websites. This time I’m writing about KeyRocket, a tool that helps you learn keyboard shortcuts in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. (In the free version, choose one; in the $5/month version, choose all three.) After installing KeyRocket, I chose to use it with Word. When I highlighted text and clicked the “U” button on the Home tab, this popped up in the lower right corner of my screen. And then afterRead More →

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New data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds “63% of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of dailycommunication, including phone calling by cell phone (39% do that with others every day), face-to-face socializing outside of school (35%), social network site messaging (29%), instant messaging (22%), talking on landlines (19%) and emailing (6%).” Next quarter I’m trying out SendHub, a group texting service. This will allow me to text all of my students at once. Students can sign up by texting a word I’ve givenRead More →

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I sometimes use my computer’s desktop to store newly-created files or newly-downloaded files that I’m working on. On more than one occasion I have gotten home only to realize that the files I want are on my work desktop. A solution comes to us from this Lifehacker blog post. The author of the post goes so far as to sync both desktops. That’s more than what I need. I just want to access the files on my work desktop from home. The solution: Change the location of my work computer’s desktop folder. (Did you know that what shows on your desktop is just stuff stored inRead More →