Books and Tips For Windows and Word

I love Amazon’s used books. I got a box of paperbacks for Dale today. He has decided he wants to go back and start reading all of Sue Grafton‘s books in order. He has read A through F and I got an entire box in the mail today – G through N. For those of you who do not read mysteries Sue Grafton’s books have titles like “M is for Murder” and “I is for Innocence”. The main character is a girl private detective named Kinsey Milhone. These books should last him through the transplant process.

I got a copy of PowerPoint For Teachers by Ellen Finkelstein and Pavel Samsonov which looks pretty good. It walks you through creation of presentations to use in the classroom and I hope to learn some new techniques that I can post here. I am making a little collection of things to read and learn and blog about during Dale’s hospitalization and this will be part of that.

Part of my job is supporting teachers in their use of technology and I forget sometimes that while I get excited about Web 2.0 tools and blogging and wikis and skype, I forget that most people just want to know little tricks that make their job easier. Today I showed one person keyboard shortcuts – Windows/E for opening Windows Explorer and Windows/L for locking their computer and being able to log back in and have all their programs still open. Another person just wanted the steps for creating a folder on their desktop and instructions on how to save documents directly to it. Two people were made happy by something that took me just a few moments.

To make a new folder by the way – you right click on a blank space whether it be on your desktop or within another folder. Choose new and then choose folder. Rename your folder and then when you create a document you want to save in that folder click on File/Save As and using the drop down box navigate to the folder you just created. Voila!
I also learned you can link text boxes in Word. A class project entails some students creating a magazine type article that I mentioned in the previous post. While the Word column function doesn’t do exactly what they need another way to go is putting everything in text boxes and then “linking” them so that text will flow from one to the next if there is more text that will fit in the box.

1. Hover the mouse pointer over the border of the first text box. The pointer shape changes to the Move shape (looks like a plus sign with arrows at the ends of the lines)

2. Right click and choose Create Text Box Link

3. The mouse pointer will change to a “pitcher” shape.

4. Click in the box you wish to link to – the text will now “pour” from the first text box into the second.

5. You can link more than one text box but you must always link forward – you cannot link backwards.

This is still not an ideal answer but it gives you a some control and another option.

I love technology but I like making people happy too! New books, happy people – it was a good day!

Microsoft Word Column Limits

A class was trying to do a project today and the idea was to use Word in three column format to create a magazine style article. The problem was that they needed to be able to insert a picture and the teacher wanted that picture to be able to span several columns and have the text wrap around it but still stay in column format. Microsoft Office 2000 and 2003 were being used. I tried to figure out a way to make it work and created a text box to use as the container for the picture. On my MacBook it worked like a charm. Unfortunately the text wrapping part didn’t work so well when I tried it on the PC.
Microsoft Word worked better on my MacBook than on the PC? That is just weird.

Mindboggling Photosynth!

I saw a video yesterday (thanks for the heads up, Tony) that showed a gorgeous application called Photosynth. You can check it out at Microsoft Labs and as the news spreads there will be more videos and articles about it on the internet. If I understand it correctly – image resolution will no longer be a problem.

It creates a three-D image of other images – thousands of images taken by thousands of people. You can zoom in and out without losing quality.

Think back to a time when you have found a picture on the web that you wanted to use in a document. You saved it and then inserted it into your document but it was just a little thumbnail. You stretched it out to the size you wanted and it became ugly, blurry, and pixelated (or blocky) Not so with this – if you watch the demonstration you will see an entire book and the presenter will zoom in and the fonts will stay clear and smooth no matter what size you view.

The three-D part is where is gets confusing and exciting. You have this huge collection of photos (his demonstration used photos of Notre Dame) and all of the view might be slightly different and yet you can use this to get a 3D view of the site. You can also see from different perspectives and it looks like you can see the exact spot the photo was taken from.

Another aspect of this that is very cool is metadata. Metadata is everywhere and it simply means data about data. A non-computer example would be card catalogs in libraries. The card catalog is not the book but it tells you where the book can be found, who wrote it, and other information about the book. Metadata can describe a file or a web page. If you are looking at a web page and view the source code you will see some entries near the top that begin with meta – these usually contain information like keywords that help search engines find the website. Imagine that all these photos have been tagged with keywords and also contain metadata that gives you the time and date the photo was taken, gps coordinates for the exact spot where the photo was taken and much more. Imagine that all these photos coming together as a 3D view of the groups of them and the metadata for one becomes part of all.

I’m still trying to digest it. It gives a whole new meaning to research on the web. I think this will be huge and there will be more and better information as this becomes more known. My only saving grace is that in trying to find out more about it I ran across people much more knowledgeable than I am who were also asking tons of questions.

The implications for ecology, biology, and even astronomy are interesting. Of course we will needs some travelers willing to take their digital cameras to space for that. Imagine using this with microscopic photography, pictures taken from inside hurricanes and tornadoes, legal implications if this type of software is able to create images that can be admitted as evidence in a case.

What about the cultural implications of this and all the metadata that exists out there that leaves our “footprints”. If this application can zoom in on a building detail it can pick out the details of a face or hand in a crowd. We have historically worried about protecting our “privacy” on the internet but I wonder if as we become more aware of how transparent we are and how discoverable, will it cause us to live differently? You know the old saying about people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones? They shouldn’t walk around naked with the lights on either. However – if you know the lights are going to be on – won’t you behave differently? Maybe this transparency isn’t all bad – if it means that we will strive to be perceived as better then we will act better and in the act, maybe become better. As our culture affects how we develop technology we more and more can see how technology affects culture. This is another one of those times when we can’t see ahead to what the long term repercussions will be but this is one that makes me hopeful.

Visually speaking, some thoughts were expressed in this quote “I used to live in Arizona, several years ago, and you’ll notice that the further away you get from a mountain, the more its figure stays the same regardless how far left you go, or how far right. I wonder how the software handles perspective, and distance on this magnitude.
Buildings, which have unnatural forms will look rather different depending on where you are. But mountains tend to retain their figure when you are further away, walking left or right.” http://channel9.msdn.com

Another person on this particular forum brought up the cameras that they use for intricate surgery and how they could use this technology to build 3D surgery so they could study it further.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is the presenter and worked on the project before Microsoft purchased the companies that developed it. I hope you will watch the video because my explanation and description do not come close to the reality of this application. It truly has to be seen to be believed.

You can see a video here

Dr. Mary Ann Bell at TCEA

If you have never met Dr. Bell you are missing a treat. Fiesty, fun, and way ahead of her time. She recently started her own blog and voiced concern about how schools are blocking many of the web 2.0 sites that she was planning to talk abou tin her TCEA presentation.

Dr. Bell’s presentation was called Fun, New and Free Ideas and Services Via the Internet. If you click on her name above it will take you to the portal to her site where you can access the links she shared as well as previous presentations.

She gives links to all kinds of useful sites as well as complete text professional online journals.

One link Dr. Bell showed was Starfall, a site for elementary phonics and reading . She recommended some blogs to read and I will list them but let you check out the rest on the handout on her site.

alibraryisalibrary

blogwithoutalibrary

One of the library blogs led me to a great Geography resource – Library of Congress Portals to the World.

Dr. Bell also mentioned Bernie Poole‘s site where you can find tons of resources and if you click on the link on the left side title online books you can download entire books he has written including several wonderful tutorials on using Microsoft Office.

Nancy Pearl was with her as usual. Nancy Pearl is the fabulous “shushing” librarian figurine that travels everywhere with Dr. Bell and gets her picture taken in the most interesting places. You can find her photos on Flickr.

Open Office for Macs!

I am taking a little time to do some reading. The laundry is piling up and the dishes need to be washed but it will all be there tomorrow so here goes.

There was an article about Open Office soon running natively on Macs. I’m looking forward to it. I have always liked Open Office because it is something students can put on their home computers when they can’t afford the big expensive office suite and save their work so that it is compatible with said office suite. I should mention that teachers can put it on their home computers as well. There are no site licensing issues to worry about.

I have been able to use it on laptops running Linux and ported to OSX but now I won’t have to worry about porting it. It’s a shame more software isn’t this versatile.

I still have the other office suite running on computers at home and at work but I find myself using it less and less. It’s a habit I am working hard to break. If I am going to promote it I need to learn it well enough to teach it.

There is resistance to using it widespread and I don’t know if it is a matter of people being afraid of trying something new or an attitude of thinking that it must not be as good if it doesn’t cost anything, or a combination of both.

A quote from a DIGG comment “you would think schools would ask for programs to be made in other OS’s.” I would think software companies would want to make their programs in other operating systems. Oh wait – Open Office already does that – hmmm….

Word Hanging Indent

Students working on term papers in the lab have to cite their sources. Often this requires using a hanging indent which seems to give everyone trouble. It isn’t hard to do but it also isn’t easy to find if you don’t know it’s there. The easiest way I have found is to go ahead and type your sources with no indent. Double space between each source. When you have them all typed, highlight the entire section and go to format/paragraph on the menu bar. A new menu will pop up.

Click the drop down arrow next to the word “special” and choose “hanging”. Your entire section should now be formatted with hanging indents for the first line of each section. See? Easy to do – not exactly intuitive to find.

Don’t Use Powerpoint As a Weapon!

I was reading some articles about PowerPoint today on Presentation Zen and stumbled on a few good things to remember. First was one I had heard before – the 10-20-30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, thirty point font. Someone asked Guy Kawasaki at a presentation what to do if you have to use an hour for your presentation and he said not to worry – it would take forty minutes to get the projector to work with your Windows laptop. How true!

The second article had to do with design and the author described the rule of thirds. You divide your slide into vertical and horizontal thirds. Position text and images along these invisible lines for a more interesting design. Use the image to draw the eye to your text. He had some great examples.

I’d like to see our students better educated in the proper use of PowerPoint. When I see students attempting to put an entire term paper on a presentation I ask them to pretend they are driving down the highway reading billboards. Would they be able to read their slide do 50 miles an hour without causing a ten car pile-up? If not they probably have too much information.

Another problem some students have is getting past playing with the bells and whistles to gathering the actual research done and putting the information on their slides. I tell them to imagine they have been asked to bring a Birthday Cake to a party. You don’t frost and decorate a cake before you bake it so the same principle holds true with presentations. Make the cake and then using good design ideas – decorate it!