There are a lot of social media websites out there that I would love to rangle into the classroom. Making them work in a classroom environment, not having them blocked, and pleasing the admins is the hard part. This is exactly why I was extremely excited to stumble upon edmodo.com today. A quick glance at it and some would mistake it for Facebook. A deeper look into the features and some would call it a twitter clone. I’m in the process of checking everything out, but this is what I’ve …

Often, teachers will use PowerPoint in their lessons and print off the slides for students. PowerPoint has a few good ways of doing such a task, but printing the slides and including the notes is an option that is slightly elusive since it requires the use of Word.
After you have completed your slide show in PowerPoint and have typed the notes for each slide in the notes area, you can send both to Word to edit. In PowerPoint 2007 the option is under the publish option when hitting the start …

Generally, most teachers will have everything that comes via email go right into their inbox folder, which isn’t the best idea when it comes to organization. It would be like having a giant box and having all of your paperwork tossed into it without paperclips, folders, etc…  It doesn’t have to be this way with email.

Tests that are included with textbooks or other teacher resources can be hit or miss, and often, creating your own tests and quizzes is the best way to accurately assess your students knowledge on a subject. But, it can take a while to go about formatting a test from scratch using word processing applications. That’s where Easy Test Maker steps in.

This guide is one for the beginners. However, it will make a nice reference to those that rarely use labels. If you’re like me, you only use them often enough to be able to forget how you did it last time.
This guide assumes that you have Excel and Word, and that you have an Excel file with information that you would like to sort into labels. Let’s take a look at your Excel file first.

Ever had that student that constantly turns in their work done on a program that you don’t have(ahem, Word Perfect)? Or perhaps you needed to do some work for school but the schools computer uses a program that you don’t have at home? Usually, the solution for this involves finding a program to convert it to a format that plays nicely with your computer. Sometimes these programs are free, but often not. Zamzar.com not only does the conversion for free, it does it without ever having to download a thing. …

This video sums it up all to well.

PowerPoint is an amazing resource to teachers. That is, unless we strip the “power” from it by sticking to the same old bulleted lists. One of the first steps we can take towards our liberation from the boring is by adding multimedia… PowerPoint is a multimedia presentation software, ya know. With this being true, you are free to add more than text and the occasional picture. You can add sound and video. If done well it will strengthen your presentation significantly. (If you truly want a powerful presentation via PowerPoint, …

Let’s face it. Not all students have the cash to slam down for that copy of MS Office to use Word, Excel, or Powerpoint for your assignments. To be honest, I’m not sure most teachers do either. It would be handy to have a free alternative that students\teachers could use at home that gave the same features and was compatible enough to have files open in MS Office. Enter OpenOffice.Org.

Microsoft has given added compatibility to it’s earlier versions of Office that struggle to open the new files formats of Office 2007. This is good news for teachers in districts that still use the earlier version and have not yet made the jump to 2007(most haven’t). Instructions follow after the jump.