Fun with photos...

I used one of the cool options on Dumpr for my Facebook icon and lots of people have asked about it. I discovered it a while ago and have been meaning to share.




Dumpr is an easy-to-use site for creating fun photos! It would be a great site for students to use for their "about me" slide in a presentation. No registration is required to use the site to upload an image and download the project.

Fax Machines....not!

I have always disliked the fax machine. It seems like old technology that is past its prime at this point. However, since my husband and I both need to send and receive faxes, it was a necessity to have one in the house and on its own phone line.

Over the past few years, the number of junk faxes that have come in, wasting our ink and paper, has become so overwhelming that we keep the machine off unless someone notifies us that they need to send a fax. It kinda defeats the purpose.

Back in the old dial-up days, I tried to use the fax option, via the modem, that came with Windows, but that did not work very well. Recently, I decided to see if the Web-based fax services had come of age yet.


Well, guess what? They really have! After some research, we went with Faxage. They ported our existing Verizon fax number over to their service so the fax number remained the same. The company communicated with us every step of the way-- they were great!

The system allows us to set up fax folders for all of us in the family, we can each have our own fax cover sheet, and we are notified via email when a fax comes in (and the fax is attached to the email for a quick review). If it is a junk fax, it is a simple delete! The faxes are kept in PDF format within their system and are very readable.

Of course, when sending out a fax, if something is not already digital, we have to scan it to the computer, but it really is not troublesome.

The option we chose was $7.95 per month for 150 faxes. We are saving the $24 for the phone line and $10 for the long distance service per month on the line, AND our ink and paper is not being wasted by junk faxes. I think it is a win-win situation!

New netbook on order!

Netbooks are the new "little" laptops that are all the rage. There are those that have 8.9" screens, 9" screens, and 10" screens. There are those that run Linux and those that run Windows XP Home. There are those that have solid state drives (SSD) which have no moving parts and those that have regular hard drives. There are white, black, pink, green, red, and blue versions of netbooks available. They have wireless, Ethernet ports, multiple USB ports, VGA-out and some have card readers and built-in video cams and mics.

I have had two since this class of computer came out. I started with the 7" Linux-based Asus EEE PC which was a swift little machine with a great suite of tools. I then moved to the 7" XP Home version of the EEE PC, but the SSD was not large enough for the apps I wanted to run. I fell in love with the 8.9" EEE PC 901, but, by that time, there were starting to be more of these on the market and at good prices.

I toyed with the idea of the MSI Wind (10") for a while since it had a bit larger keyboard than the EEE PC. The price was right, but the overall device was kinda large for my idea of a netbook.

I liked the HP Mini-note 2133. It had a great keyboard, but by the time I spec'ed it out to have the OS and hard drive I wanted, it was too pricey.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 came out today, but it is not available with any more than a 16GB SSD.

I have been reading great reviews of the Acer Aspire One, and the only negative I could find was it only had a 3-cell battery. The price was right, the keyboard was largish, the size was right, the camera was 1.3 megapixel, it came with a regular-sized hard drive with XP Home, and had all the best of all the devices. It does not have Bluetooth or an N-standard wireless protocol like some of the others though, but this was not a deal-killer for me.

Today it showed up on Amazon with the 6-cell battery and even a larger hard drive than the previous model, in white or a sapphire blue color (if you care about things like that), and at the price of the earlier version...w00t! I ordered the blue initially, but after reports of its "smudginess" and having to type on a black keyboard, I decided on the white one.



It is on order and I will let you know what I think when it arrives in a few weeks! (Hey, the Aspire One even has its own Facebook page!)

UPDATE: 9/9/08
For those of you who want a little larger netbook with 10" screen, the Asus EEE PC 1000H is available at mwave and Amazon for $449 with its price drop yesterday. What you get for the $50 extra dollars is a 10" matte screen, a tad more battery life, N networking and Bluetooth. What you lose is the smallish size of the Aspire, half the hard drive space (160GB on the Aspire one, 80GB in two 40GB partitions on the EEE PC 1000H), and the lighter weight (the EEE PC weighs one pound more than the Aspire One). However, the Asus EEE PC 1000H gets great reviews and would be a nice option for someone, too!

I decided to stay with the Asus Aspire One-- I want white, a glossy screen, and the smaller form factor, but I was tempted!

Working smarter

I realize I have not posted to the blog for a while. I have been micro-blogging with Twitter and Plurk and using Facebook to keep in touch with many of my ed tech colleagues. I also realize that information that normally would have been shared via blogs is getting lost in the "Twitterverse".

I have spent the last few weeks really working on making the Mac my main platform. (All my machines are Intel Macs which are dual-platform.) Those of you that know me know I am a die-hard Windows user and have been called the "terminally left-brained learner". Until OS X, I really was not comfortable using the Mac operating system and still had not spent a lot of time on that side of my computers.

All that changed two weeks ago when I moved to the iPhone 3G and MobileMe and also purchased a new iMac for home. I know there has been some bad press about MobileMe, but I have had nothing but success with everything I have done. In the past, I never had the luxury of an Exchange server and had limited access to IMAP. (IMAP allows one to keep all machines and devices in sync for email, contacts, and calendars, among other things.)

I took the plunge and moved my stand-alone Outlook folders of info up to MobileMe for my personal account, and moved my work folders to our gmail-hosted apps mail for our school domain. I also now am working on the Mac side of the machine for most of my tasks, with brief forays to the Windows side for the use of some applications.

What a difference this has made in the way I do business! IMAP is the greatest thing! No matter what device I use, I have access to all of my folders of data, so I no longer have to say "Oh, that is on my work computer and I can get it for you tomorrow."

In addition, everything is in sync all of the time. I guess maybe I have come late to this party, and all of you already have been conducting business this way for while. In any case, I am much more productive since I can easily use the iPhone for almost everything I need to do when away from the computer and I have all my data at my fingertips all of the time

I just re-read this series of articles from the Economist today, since we are studying it as an administrative team at a retreat next week. I suggest you give it a read if you have a chance. It is fascinating to think about the changes that ubiquitous access to the Internet is starting to bring to the work force.

Kathy

Pic on the bull

Just found the Flickr site with all the NECC-goers riding the mechanical bull in the exhibit hall. It is pretty funny to run the entire thing as a slide show!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/genevalogic/

We are such geeks!

Kathy

Google's Lively-- another virtual world

Maybe it has been around for a while, but I just tried Google's Lively virtual world this morning. Second Life it is not, nor does the client currently work on the Mac (note on the site says Google Labs is working on other clients), but it runs within the browser on the Windows machine very well and does not seem to take a super-machine to work it. (Maybe it might even work on the MSI Wind or the eeePC!)

Because of my Second Life experience, I had no problem creating and editing my avatar, creating a room, and decorating it. It will be interesting to try this out with some educators (and, if we make a private room) with some of our students, if that is possible at some point.

Here is my room "K-12 Educators". I cannot seem to find it in the search, but the URL, if you are trying Lively out, is http://www.lively.com/dr?rid=-5452546736007296038.

Misunderstanding at NECC?

Dear All,

It has been called to my attention that something I talked about in my presentation last week at NECC has been misunderstood. When stating that the ISTE docents had been "coerced into service" with the promise of a "virtual pat on the back", in addition to talking about how they are always there to help new users get acclimated, I was intending to point out that they are all volunteers.

They help out in Second Life because they are the type of educators who will help out in real life, too-- not for money or fame, just because it is the right thing to do. The ISTE community in Second Life has flourished in large part because of these educators.

I am sorry for any misunderstanding and I am sorry my words were misunderstood. Those of you that know me in real life, know that I would never belittle other educators. Those of you that just know me in Second Life might not realize that....

Kathy