Archive for the ‘tech tips’ Category

Mozilla add-ons to brighten your life for 2009!

February 2nd, 2009

This list has in no way been exhausted! Please if you have any others that work well for you, leave a comment.

Netvibes add feeds and share links. A nice fast way to add to your Netvibes page.

All-in-One Sidebar. This is a great one to control all of your settings in one place. Nice and handy with lots of options to tweak.

Answers. What does that word mean? Right click on the word, click look up anwers.com and bang you’re there!

Autopager. Loads the next page for you automatically. No more clicking next page.

ColorfulTabs. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.

Cooliris. Transforms your browser into a visually stunning, lightning fast way to search and enjoy online photos, videos and more.

Delicious Bookmarks. The official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world’s leading social bookmarking service (formerly del.icio.us). It integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access.

Downloadhelper. The easy way to download and convert Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. This works also for audio and picture galleries.

Downthemall! The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!This baby proclaims to be able to speed downloads up to400%.

Facebook toolbar. For the facebook junkie requiring immediate updates all day long. Stay connected.

Forecastfox. Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive add-on.

Foxclocks. Lets you keep an eye on the time around the world - or just your local time - by putting small clocks in your statusbar.

GCal Popup. Google Calendar in a nice overlay so that your calendar can be updated without ever leaving the web page.

Gmail manager. Allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.

Google Reader Watcher. Checks your Google Reader for unread news.

GooglePreview. Inserts preview images (thumbnails) and popularity ranks of web sites into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.

IE Tab. Enables you to use the embeded IE engine within Mozilla firefox. Great for groupwise!

Instaclick. Right-click on links to open them in new tabs. Firefox does this by default with middle-clicks, but many laptop mice (touchpads) don’t have middle buttons.

Morning Coffee. Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.

Mouse Gestures. Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.

Screen grab! It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.

Scribefire. A full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

Session Manager.  Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows - either when you want it or automatically at startup and after crashes. Additionally it offers you to reopen (accidentally) closed windows and tabs.

Sxipper. Forget your passwords! Sxipper accurately fills in forms, manages passwords and your OpenIDs.

Tab Catalog. This shows contents of all of tabs as a thumbnail-style list.

Thumbstrips. Find what you seek — visually.

UrlbarExt. Extends the Location Bar with set of commands to (Make Tiny URL,Copy URL,Search site,Go up,Tag pages easily ,Navigate through sequential URL’s,View page cached version,Unblock filtered websites and Surf anonymously using online phproxy servers)

Tags: add-ons, Mozilla firefox, SAS, spower, tech tips
Posted in tech tips | Comments (1)

Grade 4 technology projects

January 20th, 2009

Over the past month, fantastic learning with technology has happened throughout 4th grade. A project that began as introduction to imovie culminated in 4TD completing their own movies on a book they had been studying. The Sideways stories had their premiere in our theatre last week to an audience of parents and friends. The atmosphere was electric!
It began with students armed with a digital camera in pairs visiting the Pearl Tower Museum and photographed away, documenting their trip and the artifacts.
I then uploaded all the photos to my picasa account which allowed the students to access all the photos and simply drap and drop straight into imovie….you’ve got to love imovie…even on a mini mac!!!
Using Picasa allowed the students to visit the albums on several occassions returning to find a better shot to document their experience.
Once 12-20 slides were chosen students added their voice describing the trip. We had made sure that a selection of chinese songs were available on itunes and whammo!!!! A fantastic photostory comparing old and new Shanghai. The slideshows are on Mr Dentons blog.
What happened next was the big change in how technology is being delivered at Shanghai American School. Todd Denton learnt imovie with the students and realized the endless possibilities………..filmed a selection of short stories students had been studying. Editing wasn’t a problem, as the editing skills had been established through the slideshows, and having the students work in groups of 4 - 5 meant the creative juices and technical ability was all there. Becoming a consultant and offering suggestions and work arounds meant students, teacher and Tech integrationalist all learnt the possibilities are endless when a committed team approaches a task.
The sideways films will be posted in the coming days.
Well done 4TD!

Tags: elementary picasa, integration, Teaching, Tech
Posted in Teaching, tech tips | Comments (1)

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