HiTechHall’s Tech Waves

Here’s the second part of the Google Calendar story that many (any?) of you have been waiting patiently for. If you recall, last week we attached the RIS/RIST Events and RIS/T 8-Day Cycle calendars to our personal calendar. But in order to make these useful, we have to visit our calendar page everyday to actually see the calendars.

Luckily for those of us who don’t have the discipline for that, there is another way: We can have our calendar actually email us every morning with a chronological list of our daily events, called the Daily Agenda. It’s kind of like having an automated personal assistant who tells us what’s happening and when.

To give you an example, here’s a screen shot of the email that was waiting for me this morning:

You can’t see the line about tonight’s HS Valentine’s Dance, since it doesn’t start until 7pm, and so is located much further down the page. Notice also that the email is a compilation of all of my calendars; you see both the personal events that are only meant for me, such as “Meet w/ Tony, IT Manager” as well as school-wide events like “French Camp,” etc.

So, here’s how to set-up  your personalized version of the Daily Agenda:

Notice that “SMS” is an option here as well. It’s very easy to set up your phone so you get calendar notifications and reminders sent to it from your calendar. I have my calendar send me “reminder” texts to my phone 10 minutes before all meetings. So the next time I tell you “Gee, I forgot about our meeting,” (well… maybe I shouldn’t have told you this.)

Here’s a helpful, 5-slide presentation on the basics of using Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour.html

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A short “Holiday Edition” tip for you this week… Lot’s of questions in last weeks’ workshops about Google Calendar for RIS/T. How does it work? How do I add stuff to it, how do I see what’s going on school-wide, how do I use it for my classes?

Well, I can’t answer all of those question here, but one easy thing you can do for starters is to add the main RIS /T school calendar to “your” calendar. To do that, click the link below and wait a few moments for a box to pop up that asks “Do you want to add this calendar to your calendar?” Click, “Yeah!”

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=cmlzbS5hYy50aF9iMHI3azRqOGkyOWd1azJwZGx2aGpoZ3Q2OEBncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t

Here’s a link to the same place, but it’s 86% shorter!: http://is.gd/izoO (Regular “Tips” readers will definitely know how I did that).

Well that was so easy, let’s add another important RIS/T calendar to “our” calendar. This one tells us if it’s Day 1, 2,3 or 4, and for ES teachers, whether it’s an A or B day:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=cmlzbS5hYy50aF85YTVrcDZ2Nm9jNjZqaDhpYzAzMWIzNTk2b0Bncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t

or, http://is.gd/izsT (For not-so-frequent “Tips” readers, Here’s how I did that.)

Next week, we’ll do two more easy steps that will enable our calendar to email us every morning at 5, sending us our daily agenda. Almost as easily, we can set the calendar to text our phones with that information… but let’s just take small steps for now.

Have a great long weekend everybody!

Hi Teachers. Thanks very much for attending my workshops (and all of the other Tech workshops as well) way back on Monday. Wow, it’s been a long week! There were many good questions raised, and a few I couldn’t answer as completely as I wanted to. Now that I’ve (we’ve) recovered and I’ve done some more research, let me take this opportunity to try to answer a couple of your questions in more detail.

1. What happens to the Google Apps for RIS/T Sites I make when I leave RIS/T?

When you leave RIS/T, your school email and therefore your Google Apps for RIS/T account is deleted. The “Sites” and “Docs” you have made while at RIS/T can live on, however, as long as you assign another “owner” to them. This other owner can be another RIS/T account holder, such as another member of your department. For the time being, you can also give ownership of a site to any email account (such as yahoo, msn, gmail, etc.) as long as it is associated with a “Google account.”

Remember, once you learn how to manipulate the Google Sites tool (most people get it down cold in a hour or two at most), you can use your new skill to create websites both “inside” and “outside” the rism.ac.th domain. For example, you can create websites under your gmail account, or even using your yahoo, msn, etc. accounts. These are not connected in any way to RIS/T.

So you see, by using Google Sites to make a few websites for your classes and departments at RIS/T, you learn a skill that you can apply to making websites anywhere. Here’s an example of a Google Sites-made -website that I created under one of my gmail accounts. (It’s actually research for a book I plan to write some day). Notice it’s not associated with RIS/T at all:http://sites.google.com/site/chriscochranproject

2. What’s the “quick” way to get to my stuff (start page, docs, calendar, sites)?

Instead of going to the school website’s “Faculty & Staff” page, you can just go directly to the App that you want. If you want to go to your start page, just type: http://start.rism.ac.th. Crave your calendar? Type: http://calendar.rism.ac.th. Desire your documents? Type: http://docs.rism.ac.th
Just want to see the sites? Type: http://sites.rism.ac.th

3. What happens if I can’t connect to the Internet? How can I get to my stuff?

Using a technology called Google Gears, it’s now possible to work offline and then sync the stuff on your computer to Google’s servers in the cloud and back. So far, this is available for Docs and Gmail only. Google says that it will eventually be available for Calendar and Sites. I’ve got no reason not to believe them, since they are at the forefront of this type of computing. In fact, the Gmail syncing feature just became available earlier this week. We don’t use Gmail for our email here at RIS/T (yet), but if we did, well, the ability to sync would be a very handy feature.

One more caveat: Google Gears only works with Windows XP and above, and Mac OS X 10.5.3 + or Tiger 10.4.11+, G4+/Intel CPU and above, so it can’t be used on many of our PCs and Macs at RIS/T, which still use older Windows and Mac operating systems. This isn’t a huge problem since most of us have more recent PC and Mac OS’s on our home computers at least, and can sync to those. Eventually, we’ll have newer PC and Mac OS’s at school as well.

Here’s news on the Gmail sync feature: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/27/gmail-goes-offline-with-google-gears/

Have you ever needed to send someone a very long URL (web address)? You know, the kind that’s so long that it takes up about 3 lines of a page, like this one:

http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=2801+Ocean+P ark+Blvd&city=Santa+Monica&state=CA&csz=Santa+Monica,+CA+90 405-5200&slt=34.018220&sln=-118.457158&name=&zip=90405-5200 &country=us&&BFKey=&BFCat=&BFClient=&mag=6&desc=&cs=9&ne wmag=8&poititle=&poi=&ds=n

It’s annoying and awkward to deal with, to say the least. If you accidentally hit the space bar or add an extra character after you cut and paste, the whole link will break. Arrrgh! I’m sure you’ve been there/done that. Well, no worries. There’s a simple solution. Actually, a few of them, but they all work exactly the same way.

Snurl.com	Tinyurl.com	is.gd

If you use the micro-blogging site Twitter, or are thinking of checking out that service in the future, you’ll be especially glad you know how to shorten links.

Good luck!

Welcome back Teachers! As a teacher myself, I like free stuff  — especially when it’s free only because I’m a teacher. So here’s something interesting that I heard about recently from a teacher on my personal learning network (PLN ) at Twitter.com: Free Google Earth Pro accounts for educators. “Wow,” I thought. “Could this be true?”

Now, I’ve always liked Google Earth (who doesn’t?) but I’ve always used the free version. I could never imagine paying $400 for the “Pro” version. The free version’s so amazing, what could “Pro” possibly be like?

We’ll to tell you the truth, I still can’t say; I just signed up for the Google Earth Pro for Educators version yesterday, and haven’t heard back. But I’m hopeful I will, since Google promptly gave us Google Apps for free when I requested it for RIS (GAPPS costs “non-educational” organizations $50 a person per year).

So, here’s a link to the blog of the teacher who first alerted me that Google Earth PRO is free to Educators! You can find directions for getting it yourself here.

Here’s Google Earth for Educators, a site that includes some fast and easy ways to incorporate Google Earth into your lessons. And here’s another good one – Earth Outreach Showcase: Education & Culture.

Finally, check out The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming.This is a novel that is told entirely through the use of Google Earth!  Google knows where we are.

This works for any internet-connected computer anywhere, and you don’t even need to type “http://” if you are feeling lazy! 

Google Calendar

Ever forget if it’s Day 1, 2, 3 or 4? Well, I do. Sometimes, I even forget when and where my various departmental and section meetings are. So to keep on top of it all, I’ve started to use Google Calendar. Actually, a lot of people at RIS are now using it. Google Calendar has also become very popular worldwide; just google “Google Calendar” and you’ll see.

So to try it out, here are the few steps necessary to set up your calendar:

You’ve now added the two main RIS calendars to “your” calendar. If you’ve successfully followed the steps above, your calendar page should be looking pretty colorful right now. That’s good. But let’s make it more useful.

What you’ve now done is set up your calendar to email you every day at 5am with your daily agenda. You can further customize this to add additional calendars including your personal reminders, etc. You can even set it to text message you on your phone, but that might be taking things a little too far! (Ok, I admit — I set mine up to do that. It’s easy.)

For more information here’s a site that explains a bit more about Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/tour.html

And here’s a short video on using Google Calendar as a class calendar:

Ever notice this symbol and balloon down on the right side of the taskbar of your computer?

Have you ever ignored it and wished it would just go away? Well, please do yourself, everyone else, and your computer a favor and click it. Here’s why:

The second Tuesday of each month, Microsoft sends out through the internet all of the fixes and patches for it’s various operating systems.  Tech geek-types know this day as Windows Update “Patch Tuesday,” and it’s a very big deal in the IT world. These software repairs (patches) close security holes and other bugs that have been discovered over the past month by Microsoft engineers and fixed.

Here at RIS, like at most mid-sized organizations, the IT department tests these Microsoft patches after receiving them to make sure that the fixes themselves don’t cause additional trouble for our network (This can happen all too often.) Once the patches prove safe, they are distributed through the RIS network to our individual Windows computers. So that’s what the symbol means that you see sitting on your taskbar. And that’s why you should click it.

Depending on what version of Windows you have, you might also see these symbols:

By the way, Macs aren’t updated this way; “Sneaker-net” is the name of the technological method we employ at RIS to update them. Luckily, they require much less-frequent updating.

So remember, I’m not a network cop, but the next time you see the above symbols on your computer, I urge you to heed the seat belt slogan of the Texas Highway Patrol and CLICK IT, OR TICKET. It’ll keep your computer and our network traffic flowing more smoothly.

Everybody talks about backup, but nobody does anything about it, a famous guy once almost said. He was talking about backing up the data on his computer of course. Sure it’s not a lot of fun, and that’s why not a lot of people do it.  But just like flossing, it can really pay off in the long run. Here are some easy steps that might make the process of backing up, if not fun, maybe just tolerable enough to think about that you will find the strength to read on.

As more people have started using the newest version of MS Office, a problem has been irritating more and more users of older versions of Microsoft Office (and that’s most people). The problem is that the newest version includes a new file extension. So in Word 2007 for example, instead of the old familiar “.doc” at the end of every document you make, it’s now “.docx.” (The x stands for xml… but let’s not go there.) Anyway, this means that when a user of Word 2007 sends a document to a user of any older version of MS Office, such as Windows 2003, Windows XP, etc., the document won’t open. Grrrrrrrrr.

Here are a couple of solutions:

One option for users of older versions of Office is to download the official Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. It’s easy and free (even for those of us who are, ahem, using a “less than legit” version of the software. This is only an option for your home computer though, since to download this to our school PCs requires a network administrator to install it on each and every computer. Not going to happen.

Another solution is for the Office 2007 user, out of courtesy and consideration to the intended receivers of his document (very likely unfortunate users of older versions of Office), to follow the following quick procedure:

1. Create the document
2. Click “Save”
3. Choose “Save as Type”
4. Select “Word 97-2003 (.doc),” or “Excel 97-2003 (.xls),” or “Powerpoint 97-2003 (.ppt)”
5. Click “Save”

This will make sure the the turbo-charged Office 2007 document has been downgraded to be readable to all older versions.

Finally, there is Docx Converter (http://docx-converter.com/). This website will upload your unreadable .docx (or .xlsx or .pptx) document and email you a version you can read with your old-school MS Office. Haven’t tried this, but if it works, and I bet it does, you can thank Matt Schafer, who told me about it back in August. Thanks again Matt.

Lastly, if the whole Microsoft Office compatibility mess described above has you thinking about trying a new and simpler way to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc., why not consider Google Docs? It’s free and never has the same compatibility or (legality) issues. Many people, including myself, never use Microsoft Office at all anymore.  It’s just too much of a hassle.