Teacher Center of Broome Coounty

Eliminate printing unnecessary pages. Green Print World (free) highlights these wasted pages so you can choose not to print them. Cut down on excess printing and save a tree. After installing the program, GreenPrint becomes one of your selected printer options. Choose GreenPrint preview. Pages of your document will bedisplayed as a single page or all at once with Auto Scale.

Here is an easy to install PDF creator. doPDF installs itself as a virtual PDF printer driver so after a successful installation will appear in your Printers and Faxes list. To convert to PDF, you just have to print the document to doPDF, the free pdf converter. Open a document (with Microsoft Word, WordPad, NotePad or any other software), choose Print and select doPDF. It will ask you where to save the PDF file and when finished, the PDF file will be automatically opened in your default PDF viewer.

Tech Tip #3 – FastStone Capture

Here is a very small shareware program, free of advertising, which allows you to capture a whole page or only parts of a Web page. After selecting a print area, a window pops up showing the selected area. You can then print it without pasting the content into Notepad or other word processing program. It works for text, pictures, tables, etc. In addition, you can add text to the cropped site, arrows pointing to a specific location, etc. The program called FastStone Capture (www.faststone.org).

Visit: http://www.faststone.org/

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Tech Tip #4– CCleaner

Another FREE program, that cleans our temporary and unnecessary files. Very easy to use.The program is called CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com)

Tech Tip #5 – File Transfer, Online Storage

Even if your Internet service provider lets you e-mail a file up to 10 megabytes in size (enough for a few photos), doing so might strain your recipient's inbox. Instead, consider free file-transfer services such as YouSendIt (yousendit.com) or Sendspace.com (sendspace.com), which allow you to send files up to 100MB or 300MB in size, respectively. To use either, visit the website, type in someone's e-mail address and attach files from your computer; the recipient then receives an e-mail with a link to download the large files.

Need more space? Windows users can take advantage of Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive (skydrive.live.com), which offers up to 5 GB of free online storage (ideal to protect photos or documents from theft, fire or other disaster by storing it offsite). This password-protected service is easy to use, and you can access files from any Net-linked computer. Other free file-sending or online storage services include FileSend (filesend.net), LargeFilesASAP.com (largefilesasap.com) and MozyHome (mozy.com).

Try Picnik an online image editing tool like Fauxto, Snipshot etc. Picnik is relatively new, fast and stylish flash based online photo editor.

Visit: http://www.picnik.com/

Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org , offers an "open software" download similiar to Microsoft Office. It i ncludesword processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, graphics and much more. This is like a free vesion of Office. Users can open and edit WORD, EXCEL and POWERPOINT files when this software is installed.

It provides a system of collecting and categorizing websites that are useful in your teaching practice.
It enables you to guide your students directly to a site that has been reviewed and approved by you beforehand.
It decreases class time wasted in getting an entire class to the same website, thereby increasing instruction time.
It minimizes distraction to other websites.
Its use promotes improved classroom management in a laptop environment.

Be sure to set up your own portaportal and take the tutorial. The link to portaportal.com is provided below. Be sure to use the guest access code "teacherc" to see the Teacher Center portaportal.

Visit: http://www.portaportal.com

Tech Tip #9– Web 2.0 - What's HOT!

Here are a few sites that you can check out to learn about some of the new Web 2.0 technologies:

7 Things you should Know About - short, simple reports about new learnign technologies.

Common Craft - Explanations in Plain English - plain English creative explanations of important technology tools and concepts.

Atomic Learning - quick answers to all software questions via tutorial movies. Free tutorials and full access if you buy a subscription.

WebTools4U2Use - a wiki that allows anyone to add information.

Tech Tip #10 – Download FREE music

Freeplay Music is the biggest, the best and the fastest growing "free" broadcast music production library in the world.

Visit: http://freeplaymusic.com/index.php

Tech Tip #11– Consumer Search

For each product category, ConsumerSearch offers:

All The Reviews Reviewed: Our ranking and descriptions of all the top reviews, complete with links.
Full Story: Our complete analysis of who the experts are and what they say.
Fast Answers: Our listing of the top-rated products, according to the experts.
Where to Buy: Prices and links to retailers that offer the recommended products.

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