My district generally does not have access to Microsoft Office. In fact we have over 2,000 computers, yet we have fewer than 200 licenses of Office. Changing that is a priority for me & is a work in progress. In the meantime there are free alternatives that you can use that are completely compatible with Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, & PowerPoint.

These options fall into two categories; 1) software & 2) online solutions.

Software: The top options here are Openoffice.org and it’s little brother (albeit larger download) NeoOffice.org. These two solutions are very similar, the main difference being that Neo is essentially a repackaging of OpenOffice.org made to look & feel more like Mac software. Neo is about a 140MB download & Open is a mere 63MB. (note: both of these downloads are free but you can donate $ if you like & use them, which would be really nice of you.)

In the online category there are a few more options. I use Google Docs quite often. It is fast, safe secure, & very convenient. Google has also recently released a Google Docs offline app that both allows you to work with your Google docs offline, then synchs when you get back online. (Note: this offline application also supports other platforms including WordPress, which our district uses as our blog solution.)

Two other online solutions are Acrobat.com & Zoho.com. I’ve dabbled with both, & both may have things you may like over Google…but I’m a Google user!

Links:

OpenOffice

NeoOffice

Google Docs

Acrobat

Zoho

Google has released an update to its way cool Google Earth application. In its latest iteration Google Earth has added some stunning new features. New interface controls let you swoop in & out of locations easier, photo-realistic images load more quickly…but the cool stuff isn’t even on Earth! You can now see the light, dark, & shadow effects of the Sun, and…THE STARS! If that part of you is still alive that brings awe & wonder when you look up at night, this is a must.

Download Google Earth

View Google Earth Tutorials

Join the Google Earth Community (It’s worth the free price of admission)

I’m starting what I hope to be a weekly post, staying true to a few real friends of the teacher – the schedule (weekly) and the alliteration. Hence, this weekly post will be called Tech Tip Tuesday, but I think I’ll just post it under the tag/category TTT. Anywho, on to the tip.

There is a lot of information on line. When you find things you like and find useful wouldn’t it be nice to have them all in one place? Sure, you can try & remember were those bookmarks are in your browser, but sooner or later your bookmarks are going to look like my basement!

The more people work online, the more we realize the tremendous amount of information there is to juggle. That’s where Feeds and RSS come in. You can read about feeds here at Wikipedia’s RSS citation, but there are a couple of tools that can really help you juggle all that information.

Bloglines. Bloglines is a free web tool that allows you to harness the power of RSS and create your own, online compendium of information. Read Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s promotion of Bloglines: 23 real simple steps to making your Internet life much better.

Google Reader. Google Reader is similar to Bloglines, but you will have to create a Google account. I recomend it, but caveat emptor: you will end up with a new Gmail email account!

Pageflakes. Pageflakes is similar to Bloglines & Google Reader, but lets you organize your information in widgets.

The important thing about all these tools is that the information you store in them stays current. This is because they all run on RSS feeds. Once you create the feed between your Bloglines account and, say, ElasTECHlearning, any new content is always the first listed in your account.

There are some great educator blogs listed in the left navigation of this page if you want a head start. Leave me a comment if you’d like to look at one of these solutions together to harness The Power of The Feed!