warning, upgrade in progress!

My hubby surprised me this afternoon with a self-hosted WordPress account!

I’ve been using the hosted (aka free) WordPress, but now I have my new domain registered (forgive me in advance, as it is super long) and it is http://www.scatteredbreadcrumbs.com. I picked it up from GoDaddy – that’s where I get all of my domains from.

I’m in the process of searching through themes as I wasn’t truly settled on this one and it doesn’t seem to be available on the self-hosted WordPress anyway.  There’s lots of options to choose from. I’m trying to balance my natural inclination to pick something cute with the need to make it look at least moderately techie looking.

So if you stop by to visit my new site, please don’t be horrified, but it isn’t up and running yet. I plan to work on it tomorrow, though, so change is coming!

PowerPoint 2010 – check out this new feature!

On the Microsoft PowerPoint Team’s Blog (clicking the image will take you to their site),

they posted about how you will be able to directly trim (i.e. shorten the length) of videos directly in PowerPoint 2010.

This is an AWESOME new feature because as someone who frequently embeds videos in PowerPoint, I have always had to use 3rd party applications like Adobe Premiere or Windows Movie Maker, to trim the video clips before I put it in my presentation. I can’t wait to try this out!

Adobe: Online Professional Resource Center

I stumbled upon this tonight, Adobe’s Online Professional Resource Center.

Once that loads, you pick one of four options:

1. I need to create and distribute on-demand professional development content.
2. I need to deliver professional development with live sessions.
3. I need to deliver professional development with live sessions and on-demand content.
4. I need to provide support for online professional development programs.

Adobe then takes you through, step by step, what you need to do to create or deliver professional development in a variety of tech savvy ways! Of course, this uses Adobes products, most of which are not free, but since I have a lot of these I think it will be quite useful!

Keeping Travel Plans Organized

One of the best things about living in Delaware is that we are close to many places to visit. We are less than one hour from Philadelphia, and about two hours from Washington DC and New York City. Better still, all three of these locations have major international airports which has been quite useful for quick weekend getaways or to the other side of the world. My favorite European country to visit is the Czech Republic.

TripIt is a website I discovered a couple of years ago. It’s a fantastic resource for organizing and sharing your travel plans with anyone you choose or to no one at all if you just want a place to store all of your details online! Have you ever booked any part of a trip online? These days I book nearly everything online – hotel, plane, car rental, etc… The best part about TripIt is that you can forward the email with the travel confirmation that most travel websites send you when you book to a special e-mail provided by TripIt and the details are automatically entered into the trip itinerary on TripIt – much faster than type airline details in by hand!

Here’s my TripIt. When I log in, I see a main screen which details any upcoming trips. Sadly, I don’t have any upcoming trips. This is because we go back to school AKA work in less than one month so I planned our mega trips for the earlier part of the summer.

 

But, if you were to click on the Trips link at the top of the page, you would see past trips, the dates they took place, and who (if anyone) they were shared with. I typically share my trips with my hubby (unless he created the trip) and my Mom. Now that my Dad is online, I will probably share them with him as well. You can see that I also have the option to set a trip as “Private” if I don’t want anyone to see it. For example, the New Year’s Adventure trip in 2007 was a surprise for my hubby so I didn’t want him to know about it in advance.

When you click on a specific trip, you can view all the details that were entered. This is the most complicated TripIt itinerary that I’ve created yet. My Mom and I took a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 out of Southampton, England for almost two weeks last month. There were a lot of details for this trip that we wanted to be able to access quickly and easily while we were traveling – flight confirmation numbers, hotel phone numbers, phone numbers for the various U.S. embassies in the countries we were traveling through, etc… – we also wanted our spouses to be able to access this information as well.

Once I had e-mailed all of the travel confirmations to the special TripIt e-mail address, added a few extra details about places we wanted to visit, we were all set! I loved that I was able to access the itinerary while we were traveling from the internet browser on my mobile phone.

Court rules against Blackboard in patent fight

I received an interesting article in my inbox this morning, courtesy of the ASCD SmartBrief e-newsletter that I subscribe too. You can sign up to receive a copy, which is a daily briefing on top stories in K-12 education, here.

Evidently Blackboard Inc.and competitor Desire2Learnhave been in a legal battle for the last 18 months because Blackboard Inc. felt that Desire2Learn was “violating a patent on using a single login to access multiple online classes”.

The battle ended this past July 27 when a federal appeals court agreed with Desire2Learn that Blackboard’s patent was too broad. You can read the entire article here.

So what does this mean to educators and training? Some experts said “Blackboard’s initial patent might have prevented other companies from entering the market”. Blackboard has always been a powerhouse when it comes to Learning Management Systems.

Blackboard certainly has a presence in Delaware. I have used it as a student when I attended my undergrad and graduate colleges and currently use it as a teacher in the school district where I work. I am a huge fan of Blackboard. But there are certain things, the current Grade Book for example – the user interface (i.e. how you interact with the Grade Book) is just bleh (awful). 

I’d love to see more options, especially more affordable options, present themselves to schools because the most common comment I hear when speaking with colleagues is “that’s too expensive for our school district”.

Have you ever thought about how you Google?

Last night, four web pages saved our dinner. I’m not kidding.

I love to try new recipes – especially those by Giada from The Food Network. While I was assembling last night’s dinner – White Bean and Chicken Chili, I started coming across ingredients I didn’t have on hand. The first odd sounding ingredient was Fennel Seeds. So I Googled.

Courtesy of the All Foods Natural website, I learned that Fennel has a “sweet and light anise flavor, used in fish stocks and sauces or as season in salami and sausages, sometimes used in baking”. But this wasn’t exactly what I was looking for – so I refined my search to include ‘substitutions for Fennel Seeds’ and Googled again.

This time, according to the Chef2Chef online forums, I learned that “anise seed and licorice root” were acceptable substitutions (according to one poster). I also realized that this didn’t help me very much since I didn’t have either of those ingredients. I made the decision at this point to move on to the next ingredient I wasn’t familiar with – hoping that the Fennel seeds weren’t that important to the flavor of the recipe.

Next up – Chili Powder. I knew what this was but I didn’t have any (I seem to recall an incident where I used way too much and was told to not use it anymore). So I Googled for substitutions again – remembering that adding the word ‘substitutions’ to the ingredient name brought back what I was looking for much faster. This time WikiAnswers came to the rescue, teaching me that “you can make your own or substitute the spices by using red pepper, garlic, oregano, cumin, paprika and garlic”. Since I had most of these – I just shook in a little of each. At this point, the mixture was starting to smell quite good so I was feeling that I’m on the right track.

As the Chili continued to simmer, it was time to make the Cheddar and Scallion Bread. One of the ingredients that it called for was Green Onions. I wasn’t sure which part of the green onion to use. But the picture looked like it had a few green pieces mixed into the spread so I was assuming the green parts. I decide to Google again just in case. 

I learned from Tony Tantillo’s website that “the green part is used as a garnish” which led me to think that it was probably the green bits I should be using.

I realized something important as I finished preparing the meal. All this searching didn’t add much time to my cooking process as I did it while I was cooking. It did, however, save our meal because it ended up being tasty and not over seasoned.

Have you ever tried explaining your information searching (i.e. Google) process to someone else? Perhaps to your students or participants in a training session? Sometimes the concept that might seem the simplest to you – using Google to search for information – might not be as simple for them. Instead of giving them a topic and saying “go forth and Google!”, try walking them through your process as you search. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Getting tech help when you need it: User group: ITUGDE

User group. For some reason, those two words put together have always sounded somewhat scary to me – almost as if they were too extremely technical for even me to fully appreciate. But while I’ve come to find that some are quite technical in nature, they aren’t at all scary, and are often extremely helpful!

So what is a User group? Wikipedia says that it is “a type of club focused on the use of a particular technology, usually (but not always) computer-related.” User group members usually get together for periodic meetings, conferences, lectures, etc… The purpose of a User group meeting is usually to learn something new (often technology-related) or to discuss current topics (usually also technology-related).

A few years ago, I learned about a user group called ITUGDE, which stands for Instructional Technology Users Group Delaware. This group is facilitated by Wendy Modzelewski of the Delaware Center for Educational Technology (DCET) The mission of ITUGDE is to “facilitate the sharing of information and resources related to instructional technology to empower PreK-16 educators to enhance teaching and learning.”

When I originally heard about ITUGDE, I heard about their e-mail list (also known as a LISTSERV) – a colleague had mentioned that this was a great list to belong to because there were many tech savvy educators on it that you could access all at once simply by sending an e-mail. Think about the possibilities with this! Have a tech-related question with no one to ask? If you belong to ITUGDE, you have over 300 members (according to their website) to reach out to!

Once you’ve joined (and you can do so by going to this webpage to sign up), you will receive email messages in your inbox when members send a message to the group. I’ve found the group to be pretty quiet (meaning not many e-mails coming in) during the summer time which makes sense given that most educators are not working then. You can reply to messages simply by clicking “reply” as you normally would to an e-mail. Keep in mind that when you reply, this goes to the entire list of members. So if you have something you want to say to just one individual (perhaps the original author of the post), you might want to change the reply address to just them specifically.