I’ve been having just a little fun with Google Earth!  Did you know that you could put pictures in Google Earth using an online service called Panoramio? There are some rules.  For example, pictures can’t be of people or pets as the main subject of the picture.

You can also put full, interactive panoramas of the your campus online and then embed them in your website. Here’s a link to a panorama I did of the Upper Columbia Academy campus.

continue reading "Making the Most of Google Earth"

Schools have historically been on the tail end of technology advancements, seemingly always playing catch-up to what businesses have been doing with technology for years. This is not surprising considering the limited budgets schools have to work with and the fact that technology has been viewed with skepticism as to its real value in the classroom early on. Now, as a new software distribution model called Software as a Service (SaaS), has become popular, touting costs savings for all, the question schools need to ask is “What are the real values of the SaaS model in education?” Software investment is huge for education, and the costs of implementing and maintaining that software must be evaluated in light of emerging technology.

continue reading "The Value of Software as a Service in Education"

Last school year, we realized that our current content filtering solution was not adequate.  Experts repeatedly advise families to keep their computers in a common area of the home where all internet viewing is public.  In a boarding academy environment it is challenging to apply this advice without removing computers from dorm rooms completely.  Doing that would be counterproductive to the educational goals and would reduce parent’s ability to communicate with their children.  We have a responsibility to the parents that send their children to our school to provide an environment where pornography and other detrimental web sites are not allowed.  While we can’t prevent students from brining inappropriate material on campus, we certainly don’t want to create an environment where pornography can grow and spread without check.  If students have ready access to inappropriate material in the Internet, we will have an undercurrent breading which will not only affect the student’s individually, but will undermine the spiritual program of the school.

continue reading "Content Filtering – One Year Later"

In an earlier article I discussed using the built-in library of SmartArt graphic organizers in Microsoft Office 2007 applications.  As you try the different images however, you’ll soon want to make changes to them, frankly, because they get a little boring after awhile, and they may also not fully meet your needs.  So let’s take a look at ways to spice up your SmartArt graphics.

I’ve opened up Microsoft Word and want to create a target for a game I plan to play with my students later in the week.  So instead of creating my own target, I decide to see if any existing targets are available by clicking the Insert tab and then clicking the SmartArt button in the Illustrations section of the toolbar.  In the Choose a SmartArt Graphic window, I click the Relationship option on the left, because I suspect a target just might be contained in that grouping.  Sure enough, there is a target graphic available in the list of objects named Basic Target.  (See Figure 1)  After selecting the target and clicking the OK button, the graphic is inserted into my document.  If you’re following along In Word as you read, you must admit it looks kind of plain don’t you think?

Figure 1

continue reading "Modifying a SmartArt Graphic in Word 2007"

When I was using the early versions of Microsoft PowerPoint to create training content for my corporate students, I spent a lot of time creating my own graphic images to organize the concepts I wanted to get across. That meant taking the time to think about how to organize my thoughts into procedural steps to lead students through a process for the purpose of reaching a desired goal, and then designing the images to be used to help make sense of what I meant. For example, when wanting to show students that a process required completing a series of steps, I often used either the built-in arrow shapes and then formatted them to the style and color I wanted, or ended up creating graphics images from multiple default shapes. This can be a little time consuming, and may require more time than available in a teacher’s fast paced world.

The natural solution for me back then was simply to save my uniquely created graphics images in a special presentation file I called Graphics, which acted as a library of images I could quickly insert into my presentations. While that is still a good idea, and may serve you well when creating your own images, I’d like to point out that, for those of you using Office 2007 applications, a handy pre-built library of many organizational graphics images are available to choose from, making it very easy to quickly put together a useful slide. This is great news for educators with very little time. It can mean creating a great looking handout for a lesson and getting 25 copies ran off in less than a couple of minutes.

continue reading "Create Graphics Organizers Using SmartArt in Office 2007"

Too boring to talk about until I say, FREE. Yes free. The NAD has WordPerfect for free for you. Oh WordPerfect, what a let down. Well, I know there is some link for WP on the NAD website between healthy lifestyle and the link to the Association of Southern Baptist Colleges. Where is it again?

Hey, I have something easier and it is cross platform. What is cross platform? Well, it means the software is so good you don’t have to know that it is cross platform because it simply works on your computer, how is that for an easy answer? The word processing software is called OpenOffice and it is great! This software does everything that Microsoft does and I like it. I put OpenOffice on all my nephews’ laptops when I buy them. And I save hundreds of dollars. The program is fully functional and it also includes other things like a spreadsheet and so on.

In addition to OpenOffice there are some other free products are there that are real cool. One is Zoho. Zoho is a bunch of crazy guys that have been working on this project for so long that they are now giving it away because they are too tired to sell it. Zoho is amazing. A smart teacher could do so much with Zoho.

And of course, there is always Google Documents. This is great service by Google and it is also free. I use this service a lot. I both write my documents but I also save my documents to Google. Thanks Google.

I have used all three products with great satisfaction. Try them out and have fun being cheap and high tech at the same time.

Cheers,

Tom Krazan
Central California
Adventist Education is the Best

Let me start off with, I have no idea if to Moodle or not to Moodle. But what I do know is that there are educators all over the world that are Moodling as often as I am Googling. I am not an educator but I love technological advantages, that is how my company became regional with over 350 employees from a small operation in my garage (technological advantages also helps me spell fifth grade words properly but it does not help my grammer). I like you, am in a service industry and the biggest advantage I discovered was using tools developed by others, especially if they were free or almost free. Which leads me to Moodle. Moodle is free but the story is a little more complicated then that. This school software does some very amazing things. At least that is what a teacher (and a lot of others) told me. Here are two links that explain the concept, link 1 and link 2.

continue reading "To Moodle or not to Moodle"