Easy ways to expand your skills in Excel, PowerPoint, Word 2007

If you’re looking for a place to find answers about “how to” do something with Word, Excel or PowerPoint, here are two resources that will help:

http://inpics.net/   This website shows you, a picture at a time, how do accomplish a task.  Just click on the software (remember, we’re using the 2007 version), then click on your choice.  There is also a search function, so you can search for specific tasks you are trying to accomplish.

http://www.woopid.com/.  This website has short videos that show and tell you how to accomplish a task.  Like Inpics, this website has a search function, but it also has a place to browse through the offerings (which go beyond Office 2007).  Go to: http://www.woopid.com/channels.php, click on Windows, and you’ll see a list of Office sofware – Excel, PowerPoint, and so on.  If you click on PowerPoint, for example, you’ll see a list of different videos available.  You’ll see “login” and ”sign up now,” but you don’t have to register to use the website.  Just find the video you want, and watch it!

These tools might be a good way to learn a few new tricks – and you don’t have to go to a class to do it!  Enjoy.

Thanks to Richard Byrne, blogger of “Free Technology for Teachers” for these great resources. http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com/2008/11/computer-tutorials-in-pictures-and.html.

Want to communicate with parents of an entire class?

Ever wish you could talk to all the parents in a class at the same time, perhaps to announce a change in policy, or to let them know about something that happened in class?

Edline gives you that ability. When you’re in the home page for a class, look on the lower left part of your screen and click on “Send email.” Then click on “select all” and down at the bottom “send email.” You’ll get to choose if you want this to go to just parents, just students, or both. Then you’ll have the opportunity to write your email. The editor is plain vanilla – no bold, italics, or bullet points – but you can get a message sent. A copy of your email will be sent to your email address as well, so you have a record of it.

A few caveats:

• · Be sure to remember to include a subject line.
• · Be sure to include a signature (unlike in a normal email program, one won’t be added automatically.)
• · If you copy and paste from Word, formatting disappears – including spacing between paragraphs – so be sure to check through the email to make sure you like the spacing before you send it.

You could also use this feature this to communicate with individual parents, simply by selecting just their names when you first start this process.

Edline, Internet tools | Comment (0)

Dealing with copyright and fair use

“Ever find yourself asking questions like these:

• Can I play “The Telltale Head” episode of The Simpsons in class as part of my unit on Poe?
• Is it okay to include a clip from The News Hour with Jim Lehrer in my ReadWriteThink lesson plan?
• I want to show a screen capture from a video game in my conference presentation. Is that okay?
• Can a student use the chorus from Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” in a PowerPoint presentation on the play?
• The class made a video adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book. Can we post it online?”  asks Traci Gardner, of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) in http://ncteinbox.blogspot.com/2008/11/fair-use-and-copyright-for-educators.html .   The answer to all the questions is “yes,” by the way.

    Recently, the National Council of Teachers of English participated in  a report of how copyright and fair use should play out in education.  (”Fair use” refers to using copyrighted materials without cost for eductional purposes.)  While originally developed for media educators, the report applies to all teachers.  This is so important to all of us, I’m including the complete blog entry here:

http://ncteinbox.blogspot.com/2008/11/fair-use-and-copyright-for-educators.html

with a link to the complete report: http://www.mediaeducationlab.com/pdf/CodeofBestPracticesinFairUse.pdf 

One surprising finding:  teachers self-censor more than necessary.  We really can use copyrighted materials more than we thought we could, and often are being overly cautious. 

Some key considerations:  are we using copyrighted materials for teaching and learning, are we causing the original copyright owner significant financial harm, are we providing credit where credit is due (citing our sources), are we (or our students) transforming original work in the creation of new work? 

The entire report is well worth the read.

Search engine for scholars – scholar.google.com

Ever yearn for a way to search the Internet for old-fashioned peer-reviewed scholarly resources, instead of wading through links to Wikipedia and enthusiast websites?

Then look into http://scholar.google.com .

You can search academic sources such as theses, abstracts, peer-reviewed papers, books from a variety of sources including universities, academic publishers and professional societies.  You can even restrict your search to specific subject areas in advanced search.

This may be a resource that is worth exploring.
   Fran

Here are some of the directions (from http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html):

“Each Google Scholar search result represents a body of scholarly work. This may include one or more related articles, or even multiple versions of one article. For example, a search result may consist of a group of articles including a preprint, a conference article, a journal article, and an anthology article, all of which are associated with a single research effort.  Grouping these articles allows us to more accurately measure the impact of research and to better present the different research efforts in an area.
 
“Each search result contains bibliographic information, such as the title, author names, and source of publication. One set of bibliographic data is associated with the entire group of related articles and is our best estimate at the representative article for the group. This bibliographic data is based on information from the articles in the group, as well as on citations to these articles from other scholarly works.”

Creating a bibliography easily – what a concept!

Recently, I have been working with students on the dreaded research paper.  We used an Internet tool to create citations for the bibliiography.  www.citationmachine.net was much easier to use than the bibliography-maker in Word 2007.  You do need to take some time explaining the difference between different kinds of sources, but the format allows students to see what’s needed and fill in the blanks. Then they cut and paste into their bibliography – and we know that students know how to cut and paste. 

 You may wish to share this tool with your students.

For complete directions on using Citation Machine, click here:

http://www.teacherweb.com/ct/stbernardschool/mrslo/photo5.stm

You will then need to click on Creating your bibliography using Citation Machine  (as the website doesn’t support a direct link to the document).