ElasTECHlearning

• 10 ways to use your edublog to teach | Edublogs – teacher and student blogs

  tags: blogging, education, edublogs, teaching

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

• The Three-E Strategy for Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE

  tags: technology, change, resistance, education, inspiration

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

• Special Reports – eSN Special Report: 21st-Century Teacher Education

  tags: 21stcenturyskills, teacher preparation, educationaltechnology, edutech, teacher education

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

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will be painful for some users, but for us to continue to move forward with new projects we have to cut loose old & outdated solutions.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).

From MakeUseOf.com comes this list of handy YouTube URL tricks. Probably of most use to educators are the ability to post directly to a specific section of a video, hiding the search box, and disabling related videos. They’re all pretty cool, & hopefully some make your life easier.

• 10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About | MakeUseOf.com

  tags: youtube, tools, tricks, embed, hacks, blogging, hack

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

Wednesday April 29 was a happy day. That’s the day we could stop saying, “Broadband is coming, there’s no reason to think we won’t get funded.” Why? Because we got our E-rate funding for district wide broadband upgrades! Yes d62′ers, there is broadband and we are getting it. We have a meeting with AT&T Monday to sign off on the papers we need to get the ball rolling. I can’t wait & I am very excited.

If you want more information please post in the comments section & we will provide more information, but this is great news. Increased broadband will mean faster Internet, FileMaker, email, calendars, et cetera. This is not to say that we won’t have bottlenecks that slow us down sometimes. Slow machine’s are slow machines, bad wiring is bad wiring, but vast improvements should be felt everywhere. And speaking of slow machines, we’re working on that too. And the master planning construction that’s coming to your building – that includes new wiring. Synchronicity folks!

This is one of the first things we started this year. It took awhile to get to this milepost, but we were successful. Personally I want to thank Crystal & Lorenda for handling the monsterous amount of accounting paperwork, which is on-going of course, and which is also going to help us save money in telephony.

A good day, the first of many.