Welcome to the Technology page

 

I was the tech person in five schools during my teaching career. I loved doing it until the last few years when a short-sighted board refused to let the school keep up with the times. It made me crazy, but the people who lost out were the students. Still, there are some way cool things out there. Check out a few of these sites.

All Grade Levels

 35 Best Websites for Free Educational Videos is from Top Sites Blog. This is an excellent resource for teachers that want to use educational videos that are free. During my last year of teaching, I found several sites for history and technology videos that were excellent teaching resources. Students could watch them with me in the classroom where we could discuss them, and then they could go back and watch them at home again if they needed some refreshing on the content. This is an especially good resource for teachers who are in schools with limited video libraries.

 Creating for the Web, is a series of pages that take you through the process of making web pages using html. Some tips for teachers are on a pdf file that you can access through these pages.

 Education World Technology Center: PowerPoint--Creating Classroom Presentations, is a technology article from Education World. This will show you how to help students create PowerPoint presentations as an alternative format for school projects.

 Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask , is another excellent resource from U.C. Berkeley. I forget the figure for the moment about how many web pages are actually out there in cyberspace, but there are millions - a lot of them are junk. This page is a great reference to use with students when teaching them about the Internet whether it be creating their own web sites or using the Internet for research, or how to surf safely. You can adapt the material here for use with upper elementary students.

 Everyday Spreadsheets in the Classroom , has student lessons and teacher utilities that can be created with spreadsheets. If you want to integrate technology into your classroom, this site has some easy, but useful examples.

 Excel 2000 Tutorial - FGCU Technology Orientation , has an excellent series of Office tutorials that can be adapted for Middle School students.

 Gail Lovely's Website, is a site that I have just come across recently. I still have to explore it, but it has an interesting set of resource links for teachers.

 Internet Tools Which Make a Teacher's Life Easier, is filled with links that teachers can use in their daily work. Included are: Online Storage Sites, Teacher Tool Sites (including award makers, bulletin board printables, calendar makers, puzzle makers and more!), Teacher Assessment Tool Sites (rubric makers, quiz makers, etc.), Free Web Hosting, Portals, Printables, and New Teacher Help. This is an outstanding set of links.

 Kid's Tools for Searching the Internet, has 15 search tools to use for research including Ask Jeeves, Kid's.net.au, a dictionary, a thesaurus and two encyclopedias.

 Landmarks for School , is the site of the Landmark Project. It is "dedicated to the idea that the very nature of information is changing, practically before our eyes. It is changing in what it looks like, where we find it, what we look at to view it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. Here you will find information and tools designed to help us redefine literacy for the 21st Century." You can find the Classroom Blogmeister here as well as the Education Podcast Network. Check it out.

 Learning JavaScript for Beginners, is fron the Java Script Learning Center. It has a set of 14 lessons. If you want to learn JavaScript, this is a good place to start.

 Rubric, Rubrics, Teacher Rubric Makers, has a wide variety of rubric makers available for use. Some of the rubrics include: math, maps, writing, handwriting, science fairs and many more.

 TheFreeSite.com, has lists of free things available on the Internet.

 Using Excel to Create a Chart or Graph, is an easy to follow lesson which can be used with elementary and lower middle school students.

 Using Excel to Create a Chart or Graph with Pictures in the Graph, is another easy to follow lesson from the Internet4Classrooms folks which can be used with elementary and lower middle school students.

 Using Microsoft Excel to Analyse Classroom Data, is still another easy to follow lesson from the Internet4Classrooms folks which can be used with elementary students for something like analyzing a survey. It's easy to follow lessons like this that teachers really want from the Internet.

 W3 Schools, has free online lessons in CSS, HTML, Javascript available. This is an excellent resource.

Elementary

 The One-Computer Classroom: Getting Organized, has some interesting ideas about how to get started using your one computer on a regular basis.

 

Java Scripts

 scripts and codes.com, has an extensive list of java scripts that you can use to spice up your website, including such geek things as a star trek date script. I haven't tried these yet, but check out this site for some examples in the new future. This site also has tutorials for Dreamweaver, Java, PHP, and more.

Mac Stuff

 Burn is a free burning application for the Mac OS. OK, I have other burning applications, but I am always on the lookout for free good ones made especially for the Mac. This is open source, and I love open source stuff.

 Disk Inventory X, is this cool utility for Macs that gives you a graphical rendering of your disk usage. Besides looking really cool with lots of colors, this is a way where those big video and audio files that you have forgotten about suddenly smack you right in the face and say. "Get rid of me." I've just taken 4 gb of stuff off of my computer and burned onto a DVD thanks to this program. And it's free.

 FreeMacWare.com, is a site where you can get reviews on the latest and best free Mac software. Get the RSS feed to automatically get updates.

 Lifehacker: Set Up and Get to Know Your New Mac is an article for folks who just got a new Mac and don't really know all the cool things that they can do with it. Well worth reading even for folks like me who have had Macs for years - I learned some new cool things to do with my Mac.

 Mac Forums, is a forum for Mac users. Mac users are a very vocal group and generally ready to help with information. This is a particularly good site if you are new to the Macs or a returning Mac person like me.

 Mac OSX hints, is a great site for Mac folks. This place has over 10,000 hints and a forum as well. I'll be checking this out during the upcoming break.

 Menu Meters is another cool Mac utility that lets you monitor your CPU, memory, disk, and network. I've been using this for months now and had forgotten all about where it came from. A great program and it's free, but you can donate if you would like to help out the developer.

 Pure Mac: Software for Macintosh , is another site with software your the Mac. I love these kinds of sites because I love trying out new software.

 Things Macintosh , is a cool site that I just discovered for the Mac fanatic. This page has links to hardware, software and other cool Mac stuff. Definitely a check it site for Mac people.

Middle School

 Middle School Net, has a great list of Internet resources to use with your classes if you teach technology courses. You can learn how to write HTML, create forums, join lists, find free graphics and fonts. This is an excellent site.

 Style Sheets for Citing Internet & Electronic Resources, is a valuable site for middle and high school students, as well as teachers, who need to know how to cite electronic references.

 Web Quests, has six links to sites about creating web quests.

 Meridian: A Middle School Computer Technologies Journal, is an electronic journal dedicated to research and technology in Middle School classrooms. It is published twice a year. Excellent stuff.

 Technology Integration in Education by Linda J. Burkhart: Middle School - Uses of the Internet, is about Middle School students researching on the Web. This site has some excellent suggestions and links for using the Internet for research. If you are just about to get into this with your students, checking out this site can save you some time and pain.

 Word 2000 Tutorial, comes from Florida Gulf Coast University. It is an excellent tutorial. I have this listed under Middle School, but it is just as much a teacher's resource. This tutorial covers a lot of material. Go through this and you will be a skilled Word user. Find out what serif means for your font use.

Photoshop Resources

 Elite by Design , has Photoshop tips for those of you who want to do some cool stuff with Photoshop. I'll be working with these tips in a few weeks.

 Laurie MaCanna's Complete List of Photoshop Tips , has a long list of Photoshop tips for those of you who use Photoshop (and who doesn't) and would like to do some cool things without reading the manual.

 Photoshop Tutorials - Photoshop Freebies, is a Firefox extension to help in downloading media files from the Web. In particular, it is able to store on your disk movie files for which the web site does not provide a "Save File" feature. In addition, DownloadHelper can download, in 3 user clicks, all the image and video files linked from a website.

 Photoshop Tutorials on Photoshop Contest, is another site with some cool Photoshop tips.

PowerPoint Resources

 Microsoft Office Assistance: Avoid missing font styles in PowerPoint, is a page with three tricks to do just what the title says.

 Microsoft Office Assistance: Use embedded and link sound files in PowerPoint, is a page with three tricks to do just what the title says.

 PowerPoint and Flash Techniques, Programs, Converters, Inverters, is a page that is an excellent resource (that is it points you in the right direction), if you want to use flash movies in your powerpoint presentation. This page is from indezine which has some excellent tech resources for PowerPoint and Photoshop.

 PowerPoint Games, has seven games created in PowerPoint. The games available are: Jeopardy, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Twenty Questions, Guess the Covered Word, and several others.

 PowerPoint in the Classroom, comes from the Reach Every Child website of Horace Mann. You will find a collection of links to sites for the educational PowerPoint user. I've found a number of the links very useful.

 PPT FAQ, has answers to dozens of questions about PowerPoint. If you are working with PowerPoint and your students have questions, this is a good resource to direct them to. Have them find the answers rather than depending on you.

Search Engines

 YoYsearch - a web portal with ten types of search, - a web portal with ten types of search.

Software

 Adapter is a free application for both the Mac and PC that allows you to convert video, audio and images from many of the popular formats to other popular formats. So you can convert an .flv video to an .mp4 or .avi or .mov. You can convert .wav files to .mp3. And, even cooler, you can capture images off of a video.

 BerliOS Developer, is a site that you can check out for open source software. I just came across this - more during the break.

 Blender, is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. I've just started working with it on my iMac. There is a big learning curve here if you're not familiar with using 3D programs, but there are tutorials out there. I'll let you know how it goes as I work with it.

 Download Free Fonts is one of those sites where you can find fonts. Some folks are font freaks and this is a place to visit if you want fonts.

 Freemake Video Converter is a free application that allows you to convert video to all the major formats. Unfortunately it's only for Windows people. How about a Mac version?

 Juice the cross-platform podcast receiver, is open source software to use when you want to listen to podcasts but don't have the time to do it live .

 Major Geeks.com , is a great site forshareware and freeware for both PCs and Macs.

 Open Source Mac , is a small site with open source applications for the Mac . There are some good apps here so you should check this out.

 Softpedia, is the encyclopedia of free software for both Windows and Mac . This is an excellent site with loads of stuff to download and check out.

Technology Resources

 Absolutely Freebies, is a page with links to free things for use on the internet and your computer.

 Browse free virus protection and computer tuneup resources, is a page of links for anti-virus and spyware software from Horace Mann. You can never go wrong using protection.

 Color Palette Generator , is a page where you can enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. "This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with."

 Color Picker , is a neat little page where you can find color samples and their hexidecimal codes to match up with your images.

 Digg, is another extremely popular socialnetworking/socialnews sites. You can read what others find interesting, suggest sites that you find interesting, and interact with other uses of digg. I'm just getting around to checking this out. More when I retire and have time to explore more.

 Download YouTube Videos , is the answer to the frequently asked question of "How do I download a video to play at home?" Here is the answer, and you might be surprised to see that there are a number of ways to do this.

 Downloader Helper, is a Firefox extension to help in downloading media files from the Web. In particular, it is able to store on your disk movie files for which the web site does not provide a "Save File" feature. In addition, DownloadHelper can download, in 3 user clicks, all the image and video files linked from a website.

 Dreamweaver Templates, is a page of links for dreamweaver templates. This is great if you are like me and not exactly gifted with great design impulses. You can also find a lot of resources for CSS templates to use with Dreamweaver.

 Dynamic Drive - Background and Document Effects, has DHTML scripts for a variety of background effects that you can add to your web page. Once you get here you can use other links on the page to get scripts for other things like navigation and menu bars, image effects, slide shows, text animations and more. Cool stuff for teacher use and with some help your middle school students can use these as well.

 FILExt - the File Extension Source, is the place to go if you want to find out what that file extension means and what application will open it. This is a great place for those techies who want to clean up their machine but aren't sure what some of the files are.

 FindSounds, is a free site for finding sound effects and music samples on the internet. This is a search engine like Google or Yahoo, with the difference that it focuses on sounds. Obscene sounds have been filtered from the search so it is safe for students to use.

 Flashcards: The World's Largest Library of Printable Flash Cards, has a database of over 12 million flashcards on subjects like social studies, math, biology and much more. You can create, print, and download flashcards here.

 Flickr, is the popular site for posting photos online. It's free and easy.

 Free Fun Files,is a site where you get links to free software for PCs . It's also good to know where you can get free software. You can never tell what you're going to need or want.

 Free Goodies from Sonnyboo, is a site that promises free music and other goodies for moviemakers. This is a somewhat peculiar site by an indie filmmaker who is giving away some of his original compositions for use in other people's movies. Your students might be able to use some of this in their own productions.

 Free Webmaster Resources, is a site that has an incredible amount of free resources for webmasters. If you run the school website, or have students who are budding webmasters, check this place out. The layout is a bit intense, but bear with it and you'll probably find what you need.

 Grey Olltwit's Freeware, has educational programs and games, screensavers, utilities, wallpaper and more all for free. Grey created all of the programs on this site with the exception of some math programs. He has some ADHD programs here as well as his son has ADHD. A very cool place with some cool free things. Thanks, Grey.

htm2pdf, is a free site where you can convert your web pages to pdf format. For the time being this is free, so if you want to use it better do it now.

 Issuu is a desktop publishing platform that many online magazines use. You can upload your own publication for free. The resulting work is then viewed via a web brower online or can be downloaded. At the Issuu site, there are thousands of publications to view for free. One criticism of this site is that some of the publications violate copyright protection. I prefer to have my e-books published as PDF.

 Learning About Webquests, is a page full of links to sites about webquests. If you want to use a webquest with your students, this is a good place to start.

 MegaWavs.com has over 17,000 sound bites from films, tv, commercials and cartoons. Cool.

 Portable Apps, is a site where you can get open source apps that you can take along with you on a flash drive to use on any Windows machine.

 SoundFXNow is a site with a bunch of free sounds to download. Great if you are making podcasts or music and need some sound effects. All for free.

 StumbleUpon, is one of the new social sites that I just well, stumbled upon. It's a little toolbar that sits in your browser and gives you web pages, videos, photos, and more that other people with matching interests have found interesting. I've only had it on my browser for a few days, but it's fascinating, and I've come across some really interesting sites. You can also make new friends here.

 techLEARNING.com: Technology and Learning - The Resource for Education Technology Leaders, is a site for K-12 technology people. It includes software reviews, articles and more. This link will take you to an article on creating a web site and using it.

 Upload.sc, is a useful site for those folks who don't have their own storage space on the internet and are too uninterested in finding out how to get some but have something large that they want to share. For example, an incredibly large photo of their new baby that they want everyone to have, but can't email to because of its size. You just upload it to Upload.sc. They will take any file up to 100 mb for free and keep it for one month. Great idea.

 Wav Central.com, calls itself "the best sound site on the 'Net." It certainly is pretty good.

 Wise Words by Cool Men , is a movie soundtrack site. If you have a favorite movie like I do, check this site out for some sounds that you might like to use in your website (or to use in a website that you're leaving).

Web 2.0

 Twitter, is one of the hottest of the Web 2.0 social networking apps. If you don't know about Twitter by now, you obviously don't spend much time on the internet.

Wikis

 Cool Cat Teacher Blog, has a blog about using wikis to teach with. Follow this link to get some ideas . There are also posts on using podcasts and blogs in the classroom as well. Excellent resource from Vicki Davis, a high school teacher in Georgia, USA.

 Wikispaces, offers free wikis for K-12 education .