Need Software?

Tip of the Week #6 (TOTW#6): Where to get educational pricing.

One of the questions tech support gets a lot is where can I get the best price on software for my home computer. This comes right after – are you sure “such and such” software doesn’t have a home license agreement? While we would love to hand out software for free most of the apps that people want do not extend to home as well.

So there are 2 alternatives. One, Look for an open source alternative. There are more and more open source alternatives available today and they are becoming easier to use all the time. Most of them still lack some of the functionality of the pro apps, but you may be surprised at how close many of them have become. For instance NeoOfice for the Mac, OpenOffice on a PC, is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. The download is big and takes a little time to pull it off the Internet, but the app you get is very rich and full-featured. You will hardly know the difference. Then there are always operating systems. This is where people seem to be most passionate about not trying alternatives, but if you are tech savy and are looking for Free there is always Linux. It is as full functioning as Windows or OSX and has quite a devote following. You will definitely have to tinker a bit more to get it up and running, but those that use it swear by it. There are plenty more examples out there and I could go on forever.

The second option is to just but the software yourself. There are plenty of educational discounts available for teachers and students alike. For some of the more popular software out there I would reccomend using JourneyEd.

http://journeyed.com.

Here educators can get prices such as: Microsoft Office for Mac $79.99, for Windows $84.99, Windows Vista Ultimate $99.98, Adobe Photoshop $299.99, etc.

You do have to prove that you are an educator to receive these prices. All I had to do was mail in a copy of a dated staff or student ID. They even have a convenient web upload if you can scan your ID. The site is very user friendly and when I had a problem with billing (my problem – not theirs) there was a phone number I could call and they quickly took care of it for me. There are certainly other places, and you deal hunters may still look to try and get it on a auction on eBay, etc. for cheaper, but this site is definitely a great resource for quick cheap software pricing. So the next time you need some software I would recommend starting there.

Modeling technology

Tip of the Week #5 (TOTW#5): Model, Model Model.

This is a concept that is familiar to us as educators.  You quickly learn in teaching that the best way to teach your students how to be responsible and care about their work is to model that behavior in the classroom.  I have sat in on many classes throughout my career as a student where the class very quickly takes on the personality of the teacher.  And yet this point somehow seems missed when implementing technology in the classroom.

If you are not sure how to use podcasts, blogs or wikis in the classroom start using them yourself.  Start listening to podcasts and share what you find with your students.  Write a blog.  This is just a journal with a public audience.  You could easily keep record of assignments and upcoming events in a blog and have the class visit it regularly.  Create a wiki within your department.  Start collecting lesson resources/assessments that can be shared by other staff.  Reflect on what did and didn’t work and how you can do it better next time around.

All of these things we do, but for whatever reason – time, comfort level, anxiety, other – we don’t make the leap to translate these practices to technology.  Modeling and immersing yourself into technology is the best way to spark ideas for the classroom.  In a recent article for BusinessWeek Thomas Glocer, CEO of Reuters, said “Unless one interacts with and plays with the leading technology of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and difficult to create an environment in which creative individuals will feel at home.”

Skype Sounds

Tip of the Week #4 (TOTW#4): Turn off your Skype sounds.

Skype is a great collaboration tool for teachers. I think it has great potential to connect people and/or classes that might not have normally connected otherwise. It is another technology tool that teachers can use to bring different resources to the classroom. However as with every technology I think we need to keep in mind how to make it transparent. If we are not careful technology can be a distraction to learning as much as it can be a tool.

I was observing a classroom recently where the teacher was using an Electronic Whiteboard for a classroom lecture. It was a nice lesson and I thought the technology helped engage the students in what they were learning. About 5 minutes into the lesson however I heard through their speakers the unmistakable sound of Skype telling the teacher that a new contact had just come on-line.

The lesson was a multimedia lesson, so muting the computer was not an option and I can see the teacher leaving Skype open with an away message of “Teaching” or possibly Not available, however the safest bet is to just quit the application while teaching. The default settings in Skype do play a sound when a new user logs on. Had I not been familiar with Skype’s sounds from using the application myself I would have thought it was just another sound coming from the computer, but knowing what it was I definitely found it unnecessary.

What some users do not know is that you can configure Skype so that those sounds do not play. To do this open Skype, go to the Skype menu and chose Preferences. Then select the Notifications tab. In this menu you can chose how Skype handles any number of Events. Change the Events drop down menu to “Contact Becomes Available”. Here you can uncheck the Play Sound check box. That’s it, now you can leave Skype up and it will not be a distraction to your lessons.

I am all for teachers being on the leading edge and trying new technologies even before they find its educational impact. Unless you interact with the newest technologies you will never be able to find their educational implications. However we do have to make sure that we use that technology responsibly. If not we risk knee jerk administrative decisions such as banning certain software b/c they were disruptive to the educational environment. And when their job is to protect that environment it is hard to blame them.

Citing your sources

Tip of the Week #3 (TOTW#3): Cite your sources using Word 2008 (or 2007 if you are PC)

With many apologies to all the English teachers and librarians I have known, I have written the following:

Being a Math and Computer Science guy most of my life English was never my favorite subject. This despite the best efforts of my high school English teachers (sorry Mr. Hawkins). Along the same lines I also never cared much for completing citations on papers I wrote. It is not that I did not want to give credit to the people whose work I used, I just could never wrap my brain around all the precise rules that were required. You need a college degree to understand all of the nuances surrounding citing. If I could have just wrote:

“I got this quote from Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat”

I would have had no problems. But the whole convention just seemed so confusing to me. First I had to decide APA, MLA, Chicago or other (Even the people who came up with these systems couldn’t agree on conventions). Then I had to figure out what kind of media I got my source from; Book, Newspaper, Periodical, Internet, and the list goes on and on.

I don’t mean to undermine citing sources, as I said I believe crediting your work is extremely important, I just never got it.

So you can imagine how happy I was a few years back when I found an online resource that would do the work for me. While there are plenty of them out there I discovered Citation machine (http://citationmachine.net/) and I was in heaven. Finally something that took all of the confusion out of the process for me.

Taking this one step further I then I discovered about a month or so ago that the newest version of Microsoft Word (2007 or 2008 depending on your platform) would do this for me without having to visit an Internet site. They now have a citation generator built into the software. GENIUS!! Where was this when I was growing up.

All you have to do is click on the citation tab in the Toolbox, pick the kind of format you need (APA, MLA, etc.), pick the media you need (book, periodical, etc.) and it shows you all the fields you need to populate. After you have inputted the information Word then adds it to your list of citations. Every time need to cite that source you simply chose it from the list and Word automatically inserts the in text citation and starts to build your Works Cited page in the background. When you are finished writing your paper you simply tell word – Hey, I’m finished, can you spit out that Works Cited page now. It really couldn’t be easier. And as a Math and Computer Science guy I don’t think I will ever be frustrated by citing my sources again.

Isn’t it great when technology takes a task that caused you headaches (not to mention several 1/2 grade markdowns for forgetting the proper punctuation) and makes it a transparent piece to what I already do. That is the exciting part of integrating technology. Not forcing a technology into a situation where it may or may not fit, but finding ways where technology can make the tasks we currently struggle with easier and better than they once were.