Have you every had one of those magical, Springtime-in-Paris moments, when you stumble across a new website and you fall head-over-heels in infatuation with it?

(Awkward Silence...)

Er... Okay, I guess it's just me.

Anyway, for reasons that are too boring to go into, I was just trying to calculate what time (or for that matter, what day) it is in Australia, and I stumbled across this website.

TimeAndDate.com does exactly what it says - it gives you the current time, date and weather for any city you ask it to. Try it.

(Oh - fifteen hours or so ahead of us, if you were interested.)

2.  If you press "Control 2", you will be able to mark on your screen with your mouse or touchpad. (This looks something like a football announcer diagraming a play on instant replay.)

3.  If you press "Control 3", a timer with a ten-minute countdown will begin - perfect for break-away groups or teams in a class activity.

Pressing "Escape" will return your screen to normal.

Zoomit is a free program and it is tiny (about 80 KB!), so it will take up virtually no room on your hard drive. This seems like a small price to pay to impress jaded teenagers. (I'm SO cool!)

"Insert Photo Album"

In any given PowerPoint that I put together, just about every slide has a picture in it - sometimes two or three. (I put together a Food of the Month presentation last year with a slide that had twenty! What was I thinking?) One of PowerPoint's biggest strengths is that it lets you use strong visuals to get your points across.

This is how I used to put pictures into a PowerPoint presentation:

I'd go looking for a picture online, then when I found it, I'd copy it, then paste it into my slide. I learned the hard way to use the biggest pictures possible - it turns out that if you shrink a big picture, it looks fine, but if you try to expand a small image, it gets all pixelated and shmutzy. So, I'd paste in this big picture and it would actually be too big for the slide, so I'd have to drag it around until I could click on the corner and shrink it, then drag it around and click and shrink and drag and click and shrink, until it was finally the right size, then fool around with it until it was positioned correctly.

Then I discovered that all my PowerPoint files were insanely large.

After some experimentation, I discovered that if I saved the pictures I found online to a folder and used the "Insert Image" command in PowerPoint, my slideshows were a much more managable size, but I still had to do the drag/click/shrink thing over and over on each slide.

There had to be an easier way.

It turns out that yes... um... actually there is.

If you have all the pictures you want to use in a folder somewhere, all you need to do is open PowerPoint, choose the command "Insert" and "Photo Album". PowerPoint will ask if you want to make a new slideshow. You will say, thank-you-very-much-yes-I-would-if-you're-sure-it's-not-too-much-trouble (or something to that effect). You tell it which folder you want to take the pictures from and, BAM! There you go. You've got a brand new slideshow.

The whole thing takes less than a minute. I'd really like to come up with some clever story here that would make this seem like a bigger deal, but it really is that moronically simple. (That's why it only took me five years to figure it out.)

Try it. It's really fun.

I find it really useful to have a library of soundbites ready to use on a moment's notice - mostly for PowerPoint, but also for...

Um...

Well, you can never tell when you'll need a recording of an oboe or a polar bear or the theme song to Welcome Back Kotter. Won't you feel foolish if you needed one of those sounds and didn't have it? Hmmmm??

This is how I find the sounds I use:

Searching For a Particular Sound:

A couple of years ago, one of the other teachers in my school asked for help looking for music for her class to use in their group PowerPoint about the American Revolution. After half an hour or so of "helping" her look online for something usable, we finally had a bit of an epiphany and did a Google search for:

"Revolutionary War", music, .wav

We found something within ten seconds.

Since then, that's been my first step when I look for a specific sound. I type in a whatever keyword I'm looking for - clapping, train whistle, PeeWee Herman, etc... - then a comma, then ".wav".

Wave files (.wav) are a type of sound file that works particularly well with PowerPoint.

When you find a webpage with a sound that you want to save, there is a very cool shortcut that will save you a lot of aggravation - the Save Target As command. Right-click on the file you want to save and choose "Save Target As...". This allows you to save it directly to whatever folder you want to put it in without dealing with a bunch of frustrating intermediate commands. (This is another one of those commands that you might never have used before, but once you start using it, you'll find yourself using it it all the time.)

Another cool way of capturing sounds is with your Free Hi-Q Recorder. (Do you remember when we discussed that a few months ago?)

A year or so ago, I was putting together a PowerPoint on the Geography of Europe. Mostly because I have a very tiny brain, Bern, the capital of Switzerland reminded me of the old song, Disco Inferno - the one that goes, "Burn, Baby, Burn..."  Many online music stores, including the iTunes Store and Amazon, allow you to listen to a 30 second soundclip of a given song. I used Free Hi-Q Recorder to capture those 30 seconds, then used Audacity to edit the soundclip down to the ten seconds or so that I needed. Now my students have the dubious pleasure of using 30 year-old disco music to learn European geography.

Isn't education inspiring?

Audacity is a free, very user-friendly program that I use to edit sounds. It is very easy to learn and it's one of those programs that lets you get fancier and fancier as you learn to use it. I use it in my classroom all the time and it is a great way to hook kids into a project. (If you work on a Mac, GarageBand does the same thing.)

Finding Cool Soundbites You Didn't Know You Wanted:

 There is a website I go to called Dailywav.com. Once a day or so, whoever it is who runs the site uploads one or more soundclips from popular movies, tv shows or commercials. I have found some profoundly weird soundbites here.

One of the unexpected benefits of the brain-dead aspects of YouTube is that as soon as a cool commercial hits the airwaves, somebody will immediately upload it to YouTube. As soon as you hear something cool on tv or the radio, you can look it up on YouTube.

The third place I shamelessly grab cool soundbites from is the podcasts that I listen to each week. For the people who put these shows together, one of their jobs is to find cool soundclips and insert them into their podcasts. I like to benefit from the hard work of people much cleverer than me. Again, this is where Free Hi-Q Recorder and Audacity come in very, very handy.

 

If you are working on a PC, the command you want to type is Alt-PrntScrn.

 

On either side of the spacebar on your keyboard, is a key labeled, ALT. Press that.

 

At the same time, press the key above your F10 key, labeled Prnt Screen.

 

If you are working on a McIntosh, the command is Command-Shift-3.

There won't be any flashes of light or sounds or anything. The first time you do this, you won't think you've done anything, but you will have.

Now, open whichever program you normally use for working with pictures - it could be Paint, or Microsoft Photo Editor (both of these are on the network at DCS) or Photoshop, GIMP or Paint.net. I happen to use Paint.net, but that is just a personal preference.

Choose the Edit menu, then Paste.

You may want to crop the image or add graphics. Go nuts. Then all you need to do is save the picture.

Notes:

1.  If you are trying to show a pull-down menu, it works better to press the Prnt Scrn key first, THEN the Alt key.

2.  If you are using Windows Vista, there is a very helpful application already in place in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen called Snipping Tool, that will make this process even easier.

Audible.com

Audible is the service I use to download audiobooks. Over the past couple of years, somewhere around 90% of the books I've "read" have been ones I downloaded from Audible.

One of the great services that Audible provides its members is free downloads of any important political speeches. The first time I ever heard of the new kid, Barak Obama, that everyone was talking about was four years ago, when I downloaded his keynote speech from the 2004 Democratic Convention.

The speeches on Audible are high quality and have no commentary.

iTunes

If you use iTunes, you can also subscribe to any or all of the Convention speeches and download them as podcasts. Again, this is free.

YouTube

Sometimes, just listening to speeches isn't enough. When I actually want to watch election footage, I generally turn to YouTube. Given the nature of the internet, as soon as something interesting happens on the campaign trail and it is broadcast, it ends up on YouTube in a matter of minutes.

This is also the place to turn if you actually WANT commentary and like watching pundits wind each other up like demented clock-people.

If you have a taste for bizarre election conspiracy theories backed up by dubious video footage, YouTube is your place for that, too.

The Wall Street Journal's Interactive Electoral College Calculator

While this tool doesn't have much to do with the Conventions, per se, it is an incredibly useful and cool online application that helps make sense of the seemingly random and weird way that the candidates go about campaigning. It provides a state-by-state breakdown of the last few elections, showing the number of electoral votes and issues that have influenced voters in each state.

The really cool feature of this toy is that it lets you simulate various outcomes: what if Louisiana goes to the Democrats this time in response to Katrina? What if Virginia swings to the Republicans after all? This interactive map lays everything out for you in very clear and easy to understand graphics.

Yes, you could definitely find this information in a lot of places, but the interactive nature of this website makes it very dynamic and easy to understand. Pensylvania and Ohio suddenly seem a lot more important to me than they did before I used this tool.

I just bought this new toy at the teacher supply store while I was shopping for my gigantic, oversized gradebook.

It is SO cool!

It is called the EZ Grader. Granted, it doesn't have any wires or cables or cool graphics. It's not a Version 1.3 or 2.0 or anything-point-anything. Tragically, it doesn't even have a spokesmodel.

It simply helps you calculate grade percentages based on the number of questions wrong out of a given total. You slide a card back and forth in its cover until you get to the appropriate number of possible points for your test or quiz, and blammo, you've got all your possible grades laid out in front of you.

It's even simpler than the Hello Kitty calculator I've been using for the past couple of years since I found it abandoned in a desk during exam week.

Sometimes, the best technology is the simplest technology.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to make a little pocket for my new friend inside the cover of my gigantic, oversized gradebook.

All summer, I have been listening to a really remarkable podcast - Roz Rows the Pacific.

A woman named Roz Savage, who rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean a couple of years ago is currently rowing across the Pacific Ocean. If she succeeds, she'll be the first woman to do this. Her trip will be in three legs - San Francisco to Hawaii, Hawaii to Tuvalu and Tuvalu to Australia. Because she will obviously need to rest up between the legs of this trip, it will take a couple of years.

As I write this, she is a little less than a thousand miles from Hawaii - almost done with the first leg of the trip.

Because modern technology like satelite phones, gps units and the internet have all come down so much in price over the past few years, it is very easy to keep up with her progress. She has:

· A podcast that is updated three times a week, where Roz tells what happened to her at sea over the past few days. This is strangely compelling, especially considering that NOTHING much happens on a day-to-day basis: just rowing, rowing and maybe some more rowing (on most days, she doesn't even see birds). The more you listen to this, though, the more you end up thinking about her very tiny environment.

For instance, a few weeks into her trip, her watermaker broke down totally and completely; it will have to be replaced when she gets to Hawaii. It's not a trip-ending disaster; most of her ballast is made up of bags of fresh water, so she can drink her ballast throughout her trip, replacing it with sea water as she goes. This just means that she has to carefully consider each and every drop of water she uses. (Given that she rows twelve to fifteen hours a day, that is a very tricky balance to strike.)

· A blog - She updates a blog about once a day. (Again, fascinating in a zen kind of way - looking at the tiny details of her life at sea.)

· A marine tracking website that updates her position, speed and course every day

So, how does this relate to the classroom?

Hard to tell. If everything goes well, Roz will finish up the first leg of her trip sometime in early September - a little too early to make a viable class project out of this. She should start the second leg of the voyage next winter, which would give a teacher plenty of time to plan a good project around this.

Here are a few possible activities I see:

· Giving her latitude and longitude coordinates to students each morning and having them track her progress on a big classroom map. At the end of a particular period of time, this could be compared to the map generated by MarineTrack, the website that provides the coordinates.

· Mocking up a floorplan of her boat and planning out packing lists (sort of like the "What would you take with you in a covered wagon?" activity that many of us have used over the years.)

· Writing letters or emails as a class. One of the main reasons Roz is making this trip is to raise awareness of ocean conservation. There are some great writing assignments in there somewhere.

· Converting nautical miles to statute miles, knots to miles per hour, metric to imperial measurements, etc...

· Studying currents, prevailing winds, tides, storms and other weather systems.

· Learning just where the heck Tuvalu is and studying the history and geography of the islands of the South Pacific.

These strike me as really good projects for 4th-7th grades. (I suspect our 8th graders could never get past the idea of her going a couple of months without washing her hair or shaving her legs.)

 

In iTunes, click the listing for the podcast you want to save.

Either press the "Delete"key in the upper-right corner of your keyboard, or right-click the listing and select "Delete".

 

You will be presented with three choices. Choose "Move to Recycle Bin".

Double-click on the "Recycle Bin" icon on your desktop and there it will be! Now just click and drag it to whatever file you want to store it in or cut-and-paste it there.

Now you can edit it with Audacity or your favorite sound editor.

Yay, you!

It turns out to be amazingly simple:

If you use Internet Explorer*, look up in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, in the toolbar. You will find a pull-down menu titled "Tools". Click on that and select, "Delete Browser History". This will present you with several options. Choose the one that says, "Delete Browsing History".

If you use a Google Taskbar, you might also want to clear out your search history there.

You will notice a little menu arrow next to the textbox where you enter search terms. If you click on that, all your recent searches will pop up. (Google figures that if you wanted to find it once, hey, maybe you'd like to look at it again. This was apparently the case with Dirty Grampa.)

At the bottom of that list of searches is an option labeled, "Clear History". That's the one you want.

It really is ridiculously easy. I'm glad I learned how.

(In case you were wondering, the lady with the awkward inlaw problem was advised to have her husband talk to Grampa and to find non-computer oriented activities for the grandkids. Sounds sensible.)

* If you use Firefox or Safari or Unix, you've got your own problems. (I suspect that the process is very similar, however.)