Although I personally think that Camtasia is one of the best software for creating screencasts the below are a few of my (free) favorite apps when I need something quick:

• Screenr: It’s meant to be used with Twitter but once you save you have the option to upload to YouTube or save it as an mp4 file. You can also embed the video onto your blog or website or just share the URL via email or other methods. One note: If you have multiple mics plugged in to your computer don’t forget to select the mic input first before you start recording or you’ll end up with no audio like the same video I linked up above.
• Jing: By the same company as Camtasia. Like Screenr you can only record up to 5 minutes. But it does a great job and besides videos it creates screen captures too (the Screenr screen capture was taken using Jing). The image/video (png/swf) can be saved directly to your computer and the quality are quite impressive for a free and simple software.
• CamStudio: Use this tool if you need to create an AVI video. You can also export the AVI to an swf file right in CamStudio.

Which do I recommend? It depends on what you need. If you need a video to quickly post to Twitter, Screenr is the way to go. If you want a video that you can save to your desktop in swf format I’d go Jing. If I need a 6 min. video or a video in AVI format, I’d choose CamStudio.

Posted: February 8th, 2010 under Web2.0.
Comments: 1

Tired of using Blogger, WordPress.com, or TypePad and you think you’re ready for the installed version of WordPress (which to me is the big daddy of blogging application)? Then keep reading!

The easiest part of this is proably figuring out what your blog name will be. If you have a business then it’s most likely going to be your business name. If you’re trying to promote your work then you’d want to go with your name. But hold on, with so many websites up nowadays you want to check to make sure that domain name you want is available. So the first thing you want to do is check that. How?

• Go to GoDaddy, check availability and then purchase the one that suits you right there and there
• GoDaddy isn’t the only place to check or purchase (it’s just one we use). To just check you can go to WhoIs.Net. Then you want to find an ICANN accredited domain name reseller.
• Then you want to find a hosting company which THIS can be REALLY tough to do. It’s the heart of your website and so you need to make sure that the company you go through is healthy in many different aspect.

How do you know if a hosting company is reliable and stable?

• First you want to figure out what you want – features wise – out of your hosting provider (e.g. server space, customer service, 800#, Linux/Windows, database, subdomains, control panel, Fantastico, email). If you’re not sure, you need to either read more on this topic or find somebody who can explain it for you. If you know exactly what you want your web space to be then this process will be less painful for you and the person helping.
• A little tip if you want to mainly use your site to run WordPress. Find a hosting company that has Fantastico in their package. With Fantastico you can install and update WordPress with a click of a button. A monkey can even do it {::SMILES}. It’s nice because even though I’m an advanced WP admin having a button to click to upgrade saves me a whole lot of time. NOTE though, if you want to install WordPress MU, the multi-user, you can forget Fantastico. A basic company will do.
• After figuring the features you want to look for companies that has all or more of what you want. Write them out and if possible create a side-by-side chart in Excel or something.
• Go to WebHostingTalk.com. This place is awesome! Type in the name of the hosting company you’ve got listed in the search… the ones you’re interested in… and read what others have to say about it. If you can’t find any post on a company you’re eye-balling, create an account and post a question there. You’ll get some good answers that say day. Keep in mind that there’s no perfect company but from the first few pages of a thread you should be able to get an idea which company is good and which you should just skip.
• Make up your mind and open an account. Here’s my suggestion. DO NOT go for a year plan. Go witha monthly plan and if you like them after a few months you can do the 6-mo or even a year. But anymore I’d be careful. Hosting companies are like roller coasters. They go up and down very quickly. The company that was great 2 years ago might be terrible today. Yes it might be a bit more but imagine your website being down half the time and you can’t get your money back if you switch because despite their bad service you did agree to a contract that said no money back (usually they only have a 30-60 days satisfaction guarantee period).

Ok, so that’s that. Next time we’ll talk about plug-ins. Out of the thousands on WordPress.org’s site which are great to use for an educational blog… or blogs in general.

Posted: October 22nd, 2009 under OpenSource, Tips/Tricks.
Comments: none

Happy Monday and today I have a little tutorial that can make your Powerpoint life just a tad bit sweeter — well, ok, maybe not that good but it’ll at least give you less time to beautify and to animate your presentation and more time to think of your content… or longer lunch hour (cause your boss is so happy that you created a wonderful presentation two hours less than the anticipated time line).

Enjoy!!

Posted: October 12th, 2009 under Issues.
Comments: 1

Do you get annoyed at how Word 2007 would give you a double space instead of a single space when you push “Enter”? If yes, view the video below on how to change that default setting!

Posted: September 29th, 2009 under Issues.
Comments: none

This last week my students were asked to do a bit of Web 2.0 research. One part of their assignment was to list three apps that they found, liked, and can be useful in education. Their findings were wonderful and some of them are:

• Tikatok: Where Kids Write, Illustrate, and Publish Their Own Books. Isn’t this a neat concept? I think kids would want to write more because there’s a chance that somebody, and not just their parents, will read their creations AND also buy their books!
• Free Screencast: Record your screen, upload, and share with ease. There are many screencast projects out there but this, even though it’s still in beta, looks promising.
• WePapers: Find, read, and download tons of quality academic documents and notes on anything that you can study in college. After browsing a bit, it’s got some good resources. I just hope none of my student will ever think of “borrowing” one to submit for their assignments {::SMILES}.
• Meebo: Instant messaging everywhere. I’ve used this in my classroom and it’s nice. No need for students to create an account. I use to forget to log in but now Meebo has all sorts of plug-in to lessen that chance. It’s a nice app that you can easily embed in your Course Management System or website.
• PageFlake: The social personalized homepage. I’ve never used this before, I use iGoogle, but they’re both the same. Use widgets to personalize a homepage. I can see it being useful in schools. You log in to the Internet and voila, one page that has everything a student would need — if the widget exist of course {::SMILES}
• Cooking Thing: How to cook anything. I have a cookbook that can show me how to cook anything. It’s yellow, and I can’t remember who wrote it. I love it and after perusing this site, I like it too. I like how I can click on ingredients that I have and it’ll recommend some recipes based on my choices. Pretty sweet! There’s another site like this but again, I can’t remember :\
• HippoCampus: A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge. I haven’t given this site a good browsing time but I will. It looks great and the few that I did see looks high quality — like the site promises. I didn’t see anything that I can use but if I were a history teacher, I’d be on this site for weeks trying to find something that I’d be able to use for one or two of my lesson plans!

Ok, so those above were from my students. Pretty nice, huh? From me… here’s what I have to contribute for today…

• Merlot: Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. This is similar to HippoCampus and WePapers. The difference, or some, are that in Merlot you can find lesson plans, peer review of them, and comments.  There’s one big thing I don’t like. Unlike the other two sites where the material is uploaded to HippoCampus/WePapers, Merlot’s materials are link to the original sites which could be a blog, course site, etc. Some are not updated which means sometimes I’ll find a great resource but the link to the material is broken. Bummer!!
• Wordle: A toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. I think this can be a fun tool in speech for example, to see how many “uhms” or “so” one uses. In a writing class. Have children write words that starts with “th” for example. In writing, to help students not use the same word over and over again… just copy and paste, it’s that easy!
• Yahoo Pipes: A powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. One of my tools to mash-up contents. Ok so there’s FriendFeed or others but with Pipes you can have more control of how different content are aggregated.
• Free Rice: For each right answer they donate 10 grains of rice. Hmmm, I wonder who counts the rice on the other end? I love this site. Every so often when I come in to work I’ll get on this site and work on my vocabulary. Every time I learn something new and I’ve donated some food to in the process. I think it’d be something neat for students to do during their free time on the computer.

Last and not least, what do you think of this presentation? It was created using Prezi. Pretty sweet, no? I got an account when it was still in Beta. Fun but I wish there’s music. One of my student mentioned this too in his paper.

I’ve usually just uploaded my presentations to Slide Share for conferences but I found this too recently, 280Slides, and want to give it a try when I have a chance.

There are more wonderful apps out there but for now… this is it. Until next time!

Posted: September 28th, 2009 under Web2.0.
Comments: none

So many information and so little time. That is our world today. If you are still manually typing in the URL for each website that you visit regularly or going into your bookmark to access the URLs, this tutorial is for you.

In this video I demonstrated how I use Google Reader to keep up with all of my favorite websites. Keep in mind that there are other applications (Outlook, Sage, Yahoo, etc.) that can read an RSS feed but since I already have a Google account and I like having my daily reads available to me from any computer, Google Reader was what I decided to use.

Just FYI, this video is 9 minutes long

Posted: August 27th, 2009 under Tutorials, Web2.0.
Comments: none

Want to learn a foreign language but can’t afford classes or Rosetta Stone? Try LiveMocha! In short, LiveMocha is a Web 2.0, social networking, site to help you improve your foreign language skills (e.g. French, English, German) while helping others learn the language that you are fluent in too. Via LiveMocha you can see who is online and if you wish, chat with others to practice your new found language skills.

It’s quite fun, check it out!

Posted: January 20th, 2009 under Web2.0.
Comments: 1

Do you need to edit your images but can’t afford something like Adobe Photoshop? Are you on a tight budget? Do you just need basic functions and not all the bells and whistles Photoshop has to offer? If yes, there are a few options for you…. For many, Photoshop is the first thing that many people think of when it comes to photo editing, which I think is great and it’s been my favorite application since college, but for basic photo editing, do you really need to spend the money? Plus it has a high learning curve.

Alternatives? Window Paint is terrible so we won’t even go there and Photoshop Express is just too express. While Adobe Lightroom or Elements are less expensive, you still have to pay for them. Fortunately there are a few free editors and below are some that I know (I’m no expert on any of them but I tried doing basic stuff and they’re great).

• Gimp. Who does not know Gimp? Gimp is:
  • Free
  • Mac/Windows compliant
  • Many high end tools
  • Portable. You can run it through your USB drive. Or, get PortableApps and you can have a few apps running through a 1Gig drive. The bigger your USB drive the better (for storage and more apps) but a giger is good enough. Portable Apps is awesome. Read about it on their site but I’ll blog more about it later!
  • Did I say Gimp is free?

With Gimp I can edit images, use layers like in Photoshop and create some cool stuff… where in my case it would be a digital scrapbook page {::SMILES}. Now, don’t get me wrong. Just because it’s not Photoshop it doesn’t mean it’s easy to use. There is a high learning curve for Gimp so be prepared, give yourself some extra time to learn, and enjoy this FREE application. IF you happen to be a UCM student, faculty, or staff, please do visit Atomic Learning and you can have access to some nice FREE Gimp video tutorials. If you are a student, faculty, or staff who needs access to Atomic Learning outside of the university, please contact me and after verifying your status with the university I can give you the username and password.

• Pixlr: Another freebie but this is online. How nice is that? Pixlr has some “wicked” tools and a few nice filters. A bit more basic than downloading Gimp but you can get a lot done with this one application. Try making a nice announcement… or get ready for next Christmas holiday photo card early {SMILES}.
• Sumo Paint: I think this is my favorite online photo editor. Unlike the other online editors, Sumo was intended more for image creation than just editing. Which right there tells you… more features. After clicking here and there to me, Sumo does have a lot of features and it is more Photoshop-ish which made it easier for me to use. There’s a good overview of Sumo Paint which you can read. One day, after I play with it more, I’d love to write more about this and maybe offer a few tutorials.
• Splashup: This is the one I haven’t played much with compare to the three above. What I can see would be handy is the sharing option, share to FB, Flickr, and Picasa. After permission’s granted, I can grab images from my Flickr gallery and edit it in Splashup. Very nice, actually waaaaay nicer than Picnik.
• Paint.net: One I have not had the chance to actually use bit I have it (terrible me!). It’s Windows only (ahhh, that’s probably why I haven’t used it) and it is comparable to Gimp.

A few options there for you. Whether or not you want the installed version or an online one, for a lot of the basic photo editing that I know some would like to use Photoshop for, one of the above will serve the purpose just fine.

Have a great week and if you want to share the money you save, send it our way. I’m sure our department would appreciate it {::GRIN}!!

Savitri

Posted: January 14th, 2009 under Mac, OpenSource, Web2.0, windows.
Comments: 2

It’s Savitri here and I just want to share my favorite apps of 2008, in no particular order.

Windows

• Pidgin: This chat software is stable and gets all my account in one application. It has a Facebook plug-in too, which I love because I don’t like logging in to Facebook all the time.
• Twirl: A Twitter based desktop application. Simple and easy on the eyes.
• Flock: The best social networking browser that connects me to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, and more.
• SnagIt and Camtasia: Creating screen captures and videos has never been easier.
• PortableApps: Many OpenSource apps on your USB drive.
• Filezilla: Still my Windows FTP application of choice

Mac

• Snapz Pro X: Very awesome for creating screen capture videos.
• Adium: Like Pidgin but the Mac version.
• Handbrake: There is a Windows version too but I’ve only used the Mac one. Awesome for recording my daughter’s DVDs since she ruins it all the time. Now, each time the DVD gets scratched I can make another copy from the original.
• CyberDuck: My favorite FTP program.
• TextWrangler: Best text editor for me. It can easily open hidden files, un-corrupt Word files, and more.
• NeoOffice: Free office suite.

Web Based

• Twitter: I know half of what I know from it.
• GoogleDocs: It’s a really nice web based office suite.
• Zoho: I think I like it better than GoogleDocs, still indecisive.
• LiveMocha: Learn a foreign language for free and meet people while you’re at it.
• Delicious: Life saver for those who works on multiple computers. Best online bookmarker for me.
• YouTube: My visual manual for learning new apps.
• WordPress MU: I love WP but MU makes it easier to create multiple blogs here on campus.
• Flickr: Just a personal favorite
• Zamzar: Converts all sorts of file.

Cool but no time to really explore

• Gimp: OpenSource image editing software, Photoshop-ish.
• InkScape: Vector drawing application, Illustrator or Corel Draw-ish.
• Dreamweaver CS3: Sad, it’s just sitting there. All I use is the editor for html, css, and php/coldfusion.
• Drupal: I’m finding it more interesting than Joomla but didn’t have a lot of time to really learn this CMS.
• Acrobat.com: Word Processor, Video conferencing, pdf converter.

Oh, there are a few more but these are what come in my head at the time of writing. I’ll add them later!

Posted: January 9th, 2009 under Mac, OpenSource, Web2.0, windows.
Comments: none

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier. It’s not new and it took one, or two, extra steps and everything worked.

First of all I use GroupWise 7 and my GW syncs up to my 2-year-old HP iPAQ. Since I own an iPAQ I have always downloaded my GW calendar to it and vice versa. The main point of me having a pocketPC was for the
calendering system and the rest are just bonuses.

Fast forward… my iPAQ still works great but like many of you who loves technology it’s time for an upgrade. A smartphone is what I have in mind. Doing this I have high hopes (my husband wishes this more than I do) that I will be answering my cell phone calls more frequently. I have my iPAQ with me all the time but my phone is a different story. I’d either loose it, it’d be out of batteries or it would in my car while I’m somewhere in the house or some other location away from my phone.

Which phone? Wow, so many options!!!! I haven’t made up my mind yet. BUT, since I can now access my GW calendar via gCal there is a chance that I can get the iPhone. We’ll see… I still want to look at a few other functionalities.

Anyhow, this seems like a really selfish research but it’s not. I know there are a lot of people here on campus who would love to know how to get all their calendar in one spot in their portable devices and also access everything via gCal (you can probably use this round about way with other online calendar). So here are the steps:

1. Use Outlook instead of GroupWise on your Windows machine <– I think this is the key. I have Outlook 2007 installed but the previous version worked just fine. When you set Outlook up, you want to make sure that you select/point your Outlook to your GroupWise settings. To set up Outlook, I did the following (there are probably other ways but this worked for me after crashing my computer many time before I got to this point, I just stick to these steps):
   • Go to your Control Panel and open up Mail
   • Click Show Profiles and Add a new one
   • Give it a Profile Name and click OK
   • Highlight that new profile and go to the Properties
   • Under Email tab (if Novell GW is not currently showing), click New and then select Other and highlight Novell GroupWise
   • Go Next and that should complete the steps
   • Under the Data Files tab click Add and you can select Office Outlook Personal Folder File and click OK
   • It’ll ask where you want to save this file (I like to save it in my D drive with the rest of my files) and click OK when you’re done
   • Click on the Address Books tab and select the address book you’d like to use, I use the GW Address Book and click Next
   • Close everything until you get to the main Mail pop-up window (where you created your profile)
   • On the bottom of that page, click on Always use this profile
   • In the drop-down select the new profile you just created
   • Click Apply and then OK
   • Open Outlook and voila… your GroupWise everything will be in Outlook

From here you can sync up GW to your mobile computing device OR go a few more steps…

1. Go to Google Calendar and on the top right (next to your email address) is the word Sync
2. You’re all grown adults and should be able to follow the simple directions provided on that page
3. I used the Outlook and the Mozilla Sunbird syncing option (I don’t have Mac OS X v10.5+ so the iCal is a no go for me)

That’s it!!

I could have also not done the Sunbird syncing and just go with the IMAP but for the sake of this research I went all the way. I did notice that the gCal-Sunbird sync is very quick. The gCal-Outlook not so. The initial syncing went by fast but the once after were snail pace-ish. I’m not sure if this is my system or this technology in general. Just FYI, my Windows machine lacks juice. It is a Pentium 4, 3.4GHz with 2Gigs of RAM. It sounded so great a few years ago but now… wow, slower than I want it to be! I’ll let it go for today. I have other things I need to do. If I find out other issues, I’ll update this post.

Enjoy!

Posted: January 6th, 2009 under Tips/Tricks.
Comments: none