I was talking to a teacher today that adds their students names to everything they hand out. It sparked my interest enough to delve into the why and how they were doing it. As it turns out, it’s a great way to enforce some accountability. Putting each students name onto each document manually would be a pain though. Solution? One Excel sheet with all of your student names, and merging them automatically onto multiple individualized copies of your document. The process is a simple mail merge, which is usually used …

If your email is getting a bit out of hands these days and our previous tips haven’t helped, maybe it’s time to check into some software solutions. Xobni, a free Outlook Plugin, has done wonders for my personal email productivity. Let’s take a look at some of it’s features.

Flash animations can be found all over the web, and several can be very useful in the classroom-especially with interactive white boards. But what would happen if the site that offers it were to go offline, get blocked, or delete the video?? For these moments, it would be great to have a copy of it saved locally on your own computer, and with a little elbow grease it can happen. Here’s how.

Learning to use a computer efficiently can be a tough task if you weren’t born with one already at your finger tips. Solutions to simple problems typically aren’t obvious, and unless you have spent a great deal of time with one you won’t inherently know whether something needs to be clicked, double clicked, downloaded, uploaded, or just plain opened. J. McNulty understands your frustration and has developed a solution to alleviate these struggles over at  his site, 180techtips.com.

The following post may be a little too cutting edge for some, and still old news for others, but it at the very least shows a potential resource that could be tapped to reduce the strain on low budget schools needing more computers with internet connection. Rules and guidelines will still need to be hashed out, and key figures will need to be made believers, but the possibility is out there. With that said… here is the post.
I had an interesting experience this week that challenged a lot of what …

If you happen to be one of those teachers that live their life from the screen of your Smartphone, then you probably already know that with a data plan and a few quick settings you can have your email sent directly to your phone. Not only can you check your mail, but you can reply and often use the exchange server’s address book.
You might also be using your phone to herd your office documents together if you are running WM 6, which allows you to view, edit, and create MS …

Call me crazy, but the times when I am able to take my work home is often some of the most productive time that I have. My focus is clearer, and I am able to settle in to a comfortable place and work where the distractions are fewer. I get a type of productivity going that I could only refer to as “the zone”, but I couldn’t be hardly as productive without a quality internet connection-something that doesn’t come cheap…or does it?
I take a lot of pride in my high-speed …

Today, I was firing off a couple of emails when I noticed that the message count in the top corner said, “483 Messages”! I decided enough was enough and began doing some more research into managing my inbox. I checked up on lifehacker.com, 43folders.com, and a few others to see what was going on. One of the best words of wisdom I found, however, rested in Scott Hanselman’s blog.
Remember that your inbox is not storage, it’s a list of what hasn’t been categorized yet.
This is exactly what my inbox had …

If you’re like me, you probably have an assortment of Education related blogs and sites loaded into your feed reader or bookmarks that you like to check on a frequent basis, but one way to add to your list of resources is to use the browser add-on, StumbleUpon.
If you are unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, it’s a free service that integrates into your browser that allows you to check out sites based on categories that others have found useful. Hitting the Stumble button in your browser takes you immediately to the next …

Next year my school will start the process of moving to Infinite Campus. It won’t be an easy switch, as it seems that we still have to do training for the old system quite frequently. For the tech-savvy, it looks to be an incredible leap forward, but for the rest it could make for a rough ride in the beginning. To help out, I’ve found an incredible resource of tutorials and tips on the District 300’s website. It has all of their resources broken down and listed in a nice …