You will need: (This guide uses Office 2003)

1 Word Document (that you want to add the names to)

1 Excel Document (that you wish to pull the names from)

Setting Up the Excel Document

For the purpose of adding names to our Word document, we will want to create an Excel sheet with a column of names. So go ahead and fill in your list of names in Column A. Place the word “names” in the Cell A1as the title.

Working with the Word Document

Open or create the document that you plan on adding the names to. This could be a letter that you want to place each name in as the recipient, or a handout that you want to personalize for each student. With the document open, go ahead and place the cursor where you will want the names to appear.

Step 1 – Unhide the Mail Merge Toolbar. This setting is found under the tools menu.

Tools>Letters and Mailings>Show Mail Merge Toolbar

Step 2 – Tell Word which Excel document you will be pulling the information from by selecting the “Open Data Source” button.

Step 3 – Choose the Excel document that you will be using.

After selecting your Excel file, a Select Table dialogue will pop up. Hit OK.

Step 4 – Select the “Insert Merge Field” button. From this menu, we will tell Word how to pull the data from our Excel file.

A dialogue should a appear with the “Names” column from your Excel sheet. Select “Names”, and hit Insert.

Step 6 – You will now complete the merge by selecting the “Merge to New Document” button. This will make a copy of your document for each name in your list. When finished, you will have a new document that contains every copy. Print and enjoy.

After installing Xobni, it will take a few minutes to gather information from your contacts and the emails that are currently in your inbox. As it does this, it is gathering profile information from each of the contacts by scanning the content from the email.  The information it collects can be accessed through a side panel in Outlook.

Xobni’s side panel has several features. The first and most noticable happens when you click on an email in your inbox. Doing so will cause the sidebar to fill up with information about that particular contact which gives you one click access to:

• Their phone number(which was gathered during the scanning process if they had their phone number listed in their signiture).
• A list of people that have been included in the correspondance between you and this person.
• Threaded conversations that you have had.
• A list of any attachments that have been included in any email from them.
• A chart showing when they send and recieve email from you.

The conversations thread is quite useful as it shows all of the correspondence in one zoomable window, making the search for a specific email dead simple. You could, of course, just use their fast search option if you knew a particular keyword.

A lot of the features found in Xobni make finding information quickly from people that you talk to quite a bit, especially if you are needing an attachment and don’t recall which email it came in. But one feature that is incredible for all purposes is the chart showing their email activity with you. Knowing that a certain contact emails me at a certain time during the day, or the time slot in which most people tend to send me important messages, means that I can step away for most of the day and only check back at certain times when I know I might have something important waiting for me.

Clicking on the Gear icon in the bottom of the sidebar will bring up a list of options. One option that stands out is the analytics. Going there can give you an incredible insight to your email habits. Wondering why it is taking someone so long to reply? Check their stats and see what their typical response time is. What time do I receive the most email? You can find a lot of data there to figure out the best time to be near email, freeing you up for the rest of the day without worry.

Other tips on Email productivity? Leave them in the comments.

Xobni.com

Step 1 – Navigate to the page containing the animation that you want to save.

Step 2 – Locate the full address for the video by selecting View>Page Source from your web browser’s File menu. A text file will appear with a whole lot code, much of which is useless to you right now. What you need is the file for the animation. This file will have a .swf extension. The best way to find it is by going to Edit>Search in your browser and typing swf. You should then be able to scroll through anything on the page with those letters. Stop when you find the file name of the animation you want. It should look like src=”nameoftheanimation.swf”. Highlight the filename- in my example it would be nameoftheanimation.swf.

Step 3 Test to make sure it is the right animation by pasting it into your browser. Keep in mind that the file name refers to the page that the animation is located on, so if your animation is located at genericwebsite.com/page1 you would paste it at the end the address. It should look like genericwebsite.com/page1/nameoftheanimation.swf. If your animation pops up without the rest of the page, then you got it.

Step 4 – To make the video downloadable, you have to turn it into a link. Open a text editor like notepad and type <a href=paste the adress you just tested here>download</a>. Save it as download.html and select “all files” or html as the file type.

Step 5 Open the file you just created, it should open in your web browser and appear as a link titled download. Right click the link and select save. You can now save the animation on to your computer and use whenever you want.

Other tips? Leave them in the comments.

As a teacher working in a computer lab, J became the goto guy for all types of questions about technology. He took these questions and turned them into a service for teachers to help train them to be more fluent with those machines that sit on the their desks. The service is based on 180 short emails(one for each day of the school year) that answer these questions posed by  teachers. They provide quick painless training for topics covering hardware, software, and other general use situations. I could imagine that schools wishing to better train their teachers on how to use their machines could benefit a lot from these lessons, especially since they don’t require any more than 5 or so minutes a day. (Something that is a lot better than the after-school PD alternative.) As a matter of fact, it fits our School Improvement Plan quite well.

Here is a short description taken from his site.

180TechTips.com offers 15 hours of free computer training in 180 easy to follow 5 minute lessons.  This isn’t a boring 15 hour lecture.  We aren’t going to lock you in a computer lab for 2 days of ineffective staff development training that leaves you more confused than you were when you started.  This is the kind of relevant and uncomplicated computer training everyone needs.

You can check out the list of tips offered and check them out one by one, or by signing up for the daily email. Signing up, is easy, free, and with no strings attached. You can visit the site at 180techtips.com.

I had an interesting experience this week that challenged a lot of what I write about. The students were working on research for a project I have them working on. With only two extra computers in the classroom, there was a line of students waiting to access online sources. While the students were working I had a student pose a question. He had a phone with internet capabilities, and was wondering whether he could use it to study. I almost immediately said no, but I thought about it instead. Considering that our school’s policy states that use of personal electronic devices is at the teacher’s digression, I said yes… but that the student had to keep it where I could see it at all times and told him that all rules regarding internet access at the school would apply. He agreed.

He immediately hopped on to Wikipedia. This was his first problem. Not because it has often unreliable sources.(He was researching Metal music, something that is probably better suited for wikipedia than most) The problem was the speed with which the pages were rendering. So I pointed him to wapedia.mobi which is a version of wikipedia for handheld devices. From that point he was locked in and ready to go. Considering the student, he undoubtedly did a whole lot more reasearch from his phone than he would have done on any full size computer simply due to the fact that he was doing something that no one else was doing. Would this feeling wear off? Probably, but not that day.

There could have obviously been some serious problems with this scenerio. He could have started texting his friends or visiting uneducational sites. This of course is why I had him by the other computers, keeping it where I could see it. Considering that rules haven’t been hashed out for this type of use, a number of things could go wrong. The point here is that as technology gets better, the more we can stop taking away the tools that students use on a daily basis and start finding ways to harnass it, we could find ourselves easing the strains on our technology starved schools.

How do you feel about this? Problems, ideas? Leave them in the comments.