Attending district SMARTBoard training provided by Katie Daugird of Smarttech.

• Lesson plans and resources for your SMART Board – SMART Exchange

   

  tags: education smartboard SMART resources smartboards lessons IWB

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Just want to let you know that I appreciate being allowed to talk at your staff meeting. And again, if you think I can help out with tech integration in your classroom don’t hesitate to email me. We’ll always have YouWho.

Here’s a link to my Diigo account, specifically the tag Education. That long list of blogging educators, Support Blogging, is in there.

Lot’s of good Entourage tutorials here. There are step-by-step courses as well as video tutorials.

• 3DCADTips: External site: www.microsoft.com

  tags: Entourage, tutorials

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Click the preceding link for a short introduction to our new WebMail using Exchange Server. The video is less than three minutes & covers logging in, creating new emails, synchronization between the web & your desktop, & contacts – including distribution lists.

Let me know what else you would like covered.

Today (Edit: Today is Wednesday, July 8!) we are going live with the new email server. We will be switching over in the afternoon. There may be some bumps or hiccups, but we are ready to go. As always, please let us know if you can’t log in for a prolonged period of time. I will post updates as needed.

You can email me here: Seth Bowers

And D62 Service here: D62 Service

Starting school year 2009-2010 District 62 will no longer support Appleworks. I know this will be painful for some users, but for us to continue to move forward with new projects we have to cut loose old & outdated solutions. Appleworks falls into that category.

While some people still use Appleworks, it will not be available on district computers starting Fall ‘09. The Mothership Apple does not support it. See their official page here for more information: AppleWorks Support

Those of you that still have AppleWorks documents, do not fear. District 62 has MicroSoft Office & Apple iWork. Below is a chart on how to use these software solutions to open your AppleWorks documents. Going forward please use Office to create new documents, and remember to save your AppleWorks stuff in either Office or iWork.

AppleWorks………..New Solution
Word Processing…..Open & Save in MicroSoft Word
Spreadsheet………….Open & Save in Apple Numbers (can export to Excel)
Database………………Save as an ASCII file in AppleWorks, open in FileMaker
Draw/Paint…………..Save as a jpeg in AppleWorks

I know this is going to hurt someone somewhere, and for that I am sorry. Apple’s support for this dried up around 2002 and we cannot continue to go forward while trying to support legacy software when we have better solutions available.

This summer we are switching our email and calendaring system. We currently use Communigate Pro* (See note below) for email and a homemade version of Apple’s iCal for calendars. Both are outdated in their feature sets, difficult to support, and increasingly unreliable.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION for all CCSD62 staff that have name@d62.org accounts:

• Our old email & calendar servers will be taken offline in mid July (exact date forthcoming)
  • If you need to keep d62.org email you must save it yourself
  • The new Exchange server will already be online when the old one goes down, providing for a seamless transition
  • Email addresses will remain the same, supported programs and webmail will change
  • Entourage will be our primary & supported email & calendar program
  • The webmail address will be simpler to remember

On the heels of licensing Microsoft Office for district and staff home use, we are going to adopt Microsoft Exchange as our new email & calendar server solution.  Our license agreement with Microsoft Office makes this a very affordable option. Entourage, a program bundled with Office for Mac, supports the Exchange email & calendar solutions. Entourage will be our primary application solution for email & calendars. Those of you crafty enough to know how to set up a mail program will have no problem setting up Mail if you prefer, but the Tech Department will primarily support Entourage.

For those of you that use our webmail, I think you are in for a pleasant surprise.

Take a look at the above screenshot & notice how Exchange’s web access keeps everything ordered just like your desktop. Email on the web will reflect email on your desktop, even if you use multiple mailbox rules. What’s more, all your calendars & email address are right there too. The combination of the desktop & web-based solution should help keep us better connected.

There will be training at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year for the new email & calendar system.

* Communigate Pro and Exchange are both email servers. Mail and Entourage are email clients or programs. You use Mail or Entourage (programs) to connect to Communigate Pro or Entourage (servers).

Here’s proof that they’re on the way. Way to go team.

New CCSD62 MacBooks

At approximately the halfway point in the year our district has 45 registered blogs through our Edublogs Wordpress install. Also, some of the CHIPs and other brave classes are starting to use our Private Label install of Wikispaces. This is exciting, if a little slower than I had expected. I certainly didn’t envision spending my first few months here working on library & textbook automation – but sometimes you don’t get to choose your battles.

I am enthusiastic that we are growing a community edubloggers who will continue to see the benefits of innovation & technology integration. Now if we can just increase that bandwidth! And yes, Office is coming…

Seth

New Solutions: Microsoft Office

Expect a few new things in district soon. First off, we are licensing Microsoft Office for the entire district. I know this is good news for a lot of you, but wait, it gets better! First, this is an open ended license that allows us to install on as many machines as we need, no matter if it’s a Mac or a PC. If we add 200 machines next year (and wouldn’t that be great) we can install it on them & still be in compliance. Second, if you are a district employee you can install Office on your home computer. So if you are looking to buy a new machine for the holidays don’t spend your money on Office, we can provide it for you.

I hope you find this to be a benefit to you, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• You can install the districts version of Office on ONE home computer. If you install it on more than one then you are breaking copyright law – and you don’t want Microsoft mad at you. We are working on some kind of sign up sheet to keep track of who installs it at home – it is currently a work in progress.
• We will not have this installed throughout the district this school year. We simply do not have the manpower to get to every machine. We will try & get it to the most critical areas first. We are currently assessing what we can install on our various machines over the summer. Suffice it to say that a 9 year old machine may not be able to run the entire office suite, so in some cases the install profile may only call for Word & PowerPoint. For school year 09-10 it will be installed throughout the district. For now the tech department, including the building tech liaisons, will install on an as needed basis.
• We do not have the disks yet – we just placed the order yesterday (December 2)!

New Solutions: Microsoft Exchange Email Server

Another exciting aspect of this is that we can migrate our email service to the more mature & powerful Microsoft Exchange Server. The tech department has been testing this for the past few weeks & it’s been very positive. If everything goes well we would like to move to the new email server over the summer. This will mean a little staff development – but it will be worth it for the increased stability & feature set that will become available to us.

New Solutions: Destiny for LMCs & textbooks

Another new item that we are bringing into the district is Follett’s LMC & textbook automation solution Destiny. Replace the word automation with inventory if it makes it easier to understand. Destiny is a robust inventory solution that will provide easy access to our district’s LMC catalogue to our entire community. Further, we will have a way to track each textbook down to the student!

New Solutions: District Blogs

Another new thing is this blog software that you are looking at. This service is also available to all district employees, for school & district use only of course! If you are interested in launching your own classroom blog please do not hesitate to contact me.

Future Solutions: Broadband Connection

In the near future we are looking to bring in much faster internet & network connectivity. We would like to be able to make a decision in a few weeks & be ready to go with a new connectivity solution by the beginning of next school year.

There is more to come, but I hope this feels like progress!

Links:

MicroSoft Office for Mac

MicroSoft Exchange

Destiny

d62 Blogging