Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson. In today's episode, I am going to talk to you about the iPad app called AudioNote. There is a free version and a paid version. The free version gives you about an hour's worth of total recording time. The paid version allows for unlimted recording time. That's all well and good, you say, but just what is AudioNote?

AudioNote lets you type up notes in a yellow notepad environment. but, more than that, it allows you to record the conversation along with the notes. Every time you press the ENTER key to start a new paragraph, AudioNote will create a new timestamp. Later, you can simply touch a paragraph from your notes and hear whatever was going on in the conversation at that time.

The downside to AudioNote is that you will eventually run out of storage space on your iPad if you don't move those stored files from the device to your computer. Fortunately, this is very easy to do. Just connect your iPad to your computer and launch iTunes. Once you iPad shows up in iTunes, click on the APPS tab. When you scroll down on that screen, you will see a section called "File Sharing." You will see AudioNote in there. When you click on that, you'll see a list of your recorded items. You can them choose a folder to save the files. Once saved, you can actually bring those back on to your iPad anytime later or you can play the audio directly on your computer.

How do you play the files on your computer? First, go to the folder where you saved the files. Then, Double-click the C-A-F file you want to play. You will be prompted to choose a program to use. Use QUICKTIME PLAYER to listen to the file. I would also select the option to always use Quicktime to play them.

The text files created by AudioNote are saved as both PDF and raw text, making it very easy to share your notes and/or post your notes into another program like Word or online to a web page.

I recommend getting the free version of AudioNote and use it, play with it, check it out. Then, if you find yourself using it a lot, grab the paid version which at this time is four ninety-nine. Let me know what you think and how you're using it. Drop me a line at david dot henderson at s-w-a-e-c dot org.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Free podcast music is provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson. Today's episode is a quick and easy tip for folks that don't have an Apple computer, but receive a dot-pages file from someone.

If someone sends you a dot-pages file, save it to your computer, paying attention to where you save it. Locate the file you saved, and change the extension from dot-pages to dot-ZIP.

Once you've done that, you can double-click the zipped file in Windows. Inside there, you will find a folder called "QuickLook."

Inside Quicklook, you will find a PDF version of the .pages document! Bingo! You can read the file, or you can Copy and paste the content into a word processor (such as Word or OpenOffice), and you should be good to go.

Free podcast music provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson, and in this episode, I want to talk about blogging in your classroom.

First of all, there are very easy ways to set up a class blog. you can use blogger.com or wordpress.com or edublogs.com. Each of these is free, so you can set up a class blog without spending any money at all! And, actually, edublogs is based on WordPress and it allows you to create a blog, add students, and get publishing quickly. Again, all free. Though, there are upgrade options for edublogs if you need them.

No matter which route you take, you'll need to create a new account and get logged in. The basics of blogging are this: write about something happeneing in your class and let other people respond. Those other people can be other teachers, students, people from the community, whatever. Each site I mentioned has ways to limit who can respond and how. For example, you can set your blog so that you have to approve any comments before they appear on the site. I wholeheartedly recommend this!

Now, before I go too much further, you may be asking yourself, "Yeah, but what do I write? How often do I write?" You may say, "I don't have time for this, are you crazy?" Well, I can help answer some of those things. First of all, WHAT you write is totally up to you (or your district if there is a policy). Depending on your grade level or subject area, it can a sight word list, vocabulary, a book study writing prompt, homework help, whatever! Or, you can have the students write posts about the things they did or learned earlier that week. For example, there's a third grade class that picks two students per day to write a quick summary of what they did the day before - just a couple of sentences about what they learned or did. Sometimes, they talk about a field trip, sometimes they tell you that they had gym class. The students post under the teacher's account. Anyone can comment, but the teacher must approve the comments before they are published for the world to see.

They key here is that the students post AFTER something happened, not BEFOREHAND and not DURING. So, if they go to the zoo, you won't read about it until after they've already been there and returned. This is for their safety. They also do not use last names when they post. they are allowed to write their names in the post, but only first names. I've seen other classes where students use only their initials.

How much time does it take? It can take no time at all, really. A quick sentence or two to provoke some thought. You may find something that bears further explanation and take a bit more time with it, but it doesn't have to be long, or poetic, or mind-blowing. It can be those things, of course! But, it doesn't HAVE to be.

And, if you get the students involved, it gives them a way to PUBLISH their thoughts online! Yeap, once they put it out there, they are blog authors! They will tell their parents, grandparents, friends, you name it! Also, don't worry about spelling, grammar, etc for the young students. The idea is to get them to express their thoughts. For older students, that's different. I would apply any of the same rules you have for other written work they have to turn in.

Some classroom blogs use photos, some don't. A lot of that will depend on your district's media release policy and whether or not you even want to use pictures. Examples might be photos from a field trip, from a science experiment, or maybe pictures of class projects. There are all kinds of reasons to use photos and they don't have to show any of the students.

A blog can be a great way to extend your classroom beyond the four walls you visit every day.

So, head over to edublogger.com, wordpress.com, or blogger.com and start up your classroom blog today! if you do, let me know! I love checking out classroom blogs and I'll be happy to offer any tips or tricks!

Free podcast music provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson, and this time, I thought it would be fun to talk about some things you can do with your phone's camera.

For example, have you ever been somewhere and forgot where you parked? Well, next time you out and about and have to park away from the venue or in an unfamiliar place, grab your phone and take a picture of something that stands out - like the lot number and section, or a particular nearby building. Now, you don't want to take a picture of the cars that near yours because, well, when you come back out, those cars just might not be there!

Speaking of using your phone's camera, here's a trick I've started using: take pictures of things people want for birthdays or holidays. I started this a couple years ago because my daughter would just pick out random things as we walked along. "Oh I want that for Christmas!" and of course, by the time Christmas rolled around, I had forgotten. Well, now I had photos! Next time I was out shopping for a holiday, I would just flip through the pics. Works great for your spouse, too! And, you can use your spouse's phone to take pictures of things YOU want. Or, if you're like me, just take random pictures of whatever happens to be around. Of course, you'd better make sure the other person has the sense of humor to laugh about all the crazy photos.

Oh, here's another idea: use your phone's camera to document things like damage to your car in an accident. Or, take pictures of the stuff in your house. Sure, a full-sized camera would be better, but most phone cameras are more than adequate to do the job.

If you are on the road and you have to keep up with receipts for work, take pictures of them just in case something happens to the originals. Even if your employers doesn't accept the photos, you can get the phone number of the place and call them to get an original receipt.

Do you have a student project that involves collecting specimens? What if you could do that digitally? Students could take pictures of various leaves - fronts and backs. They could snap photos of insects, birds, trees, shapes we find in everyday objects. the possibilites for digital images are endless in education! Even if cell phones are banned in school, the capturing could be done as homework, outside of school. Then, the students could off-load those images or email them, text them, whatever. I know, there may be some costs with that, so check with parents before giving the assignment.

There all kinds of things you can do with you phone's camera! Hopefully, something I've said today made a little spark!

Free podcast music provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson, and in this episode, I'll cover a few tips and tricks for your iOS device.

I want to talk a little bit about basic troubleshooting. These tips won't be too technical or anything, but hopefully they will help you when it comes to working with your local tech support.

Just like when your car acts up sometimes, simply truning the thing off and waiting a moment before turning it back on again can do wonders. So, if your computer or your phone or ipad or whatever starts to act up or it freezes, try turning it off. And i mean turn it all the way off. Power it down. Usuallu, you can hold the power button in for about 7 seconds on any device and the device will either shut off or it will ask you if you want to shut it off.

If that fails, unplug it, pull the battery, whatever. Just kill the power to the thing. Count to ten. Yes, I mean it. If you need to, add the "Mississippi" between each number. Once you get to ten, plug it in, turn it on, boot it up. Now, since you did a hard shut down, there is a chance that the device may take longer than usual to come up to speed. That's okay. Just hang out while everything gets loaded back up.

After everything comes up, try going into various programs or apps or whatever. If the problem returns (or a different problem pops up), try a couple other things.

First, if there is ANY kind of error message, please please write it down. if you know how to take a screenshot, do that. if not, just write it down. Those messages may look like jibberish, but to a tech person, they hold potential keys to solving the problem.

Second, are you able to duplicate the problem? That is, if the problem happens when you edit a Word document, can you make it happen again? If you can make it happen again, write down the steps you took to get there. Again, this will help your tech person.

Third, check your connections: Are your USB cables all the way in? How about your speaker connections, or whatever else you might have plugged in there? A loose cable can create all kinds of problems with your computer.

The next thing to check can seem a bit daunting, but if you're comfortable with it, it will really help out: check the wires and lights. If your device doesn't light up at all when you hit the power button, check to see if it is plugged in. Does it have a battery? is the battery charged? Do you KNOW it is charged? Not, "Well, I think I charged it," but do you know for sure 100% that it is charged? If you arent sure, plug it in to charge it.

So, before you pick up the phone to call your tech person, walk through these basic steps. Most of all, though, please write down anything that will prove helpful to the person troubleshooting your device, your phone, your computer. The information you can give your tech, the more likely they'll be able to get to the root of the problem and have you working again in a jiffy!

Free podcast music provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Taking a SWAEC@Technology! This is David Henderson, and in this episode, I'm bringing back an old school topic, but it's something that has generated a lot of conversation on another tech blog I oversee.

This time, we're talking about Block Quotes in Office 2007, and possibly 2010. So, let's take a SWACK at technology!

The information in this post is found at the following location:
http://techblog.k12.ar.us/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=60

Free podcast music provided by accelerated dash ideas dot com.

Links to all of our episodes and their full transcripts can be found at www dot S W A E C dot org slash technolgy.

This is David Henderson. Join me next time as I take a SWACK at technology! Thanks for listening.

Learn some cool things to do with your iOS device: take a screenshot, auto-scroll to the top of a page, Read PDFs in iBooks, Digital Photo Frame, Four-Finger Swipe Tricks, Split keyboard, keyboard shortcuts.

A recent Bristish study finds the kids of the "Google Generation" do not know how to search effectively. DUH!
(bkgrnd music - George Wood, Propaganda)

My blog at http://etsp.k12.ar.us/personal/dhenderson/blog/ has been giving me trouble ever since we had to restore web sites on our servers. Namely, anonymous, public site visitors could not post comments without the system throwing up a non-descript error message. I finally got it working - with a big enough hammer.
(bgmusic - George Wood - Propaganda)

Want to send SharePoint alerts to a listserve? Here's how I did it.

Keeping Superintendents (or whoever YOU work for) informed serves multiple purposes, of which you may benefit as much as, if not more than, the audience does.

 Having worked in education and the corporate world, I have noticed differences in the way people "play together."

 No matter what business you're in, if your users can't understand what you are telling them, then you are not helping them.