Teachers end up collecting bookmarks on their internet browser, lots of bookmarks. And it’s quite frustrating when you know you have a site bookmarked, but it’s either at home, or at school, and you just happen to be exactly where the bookmark is not. It can also become an organizational nightmare when you start mixing bookmarks: school, finances, home, fun stuff, kids’ websites.

Here’s where Foxmarks comes in. It will not only allow you to synchronize bookmarks to all your computers, but will now let you synchronize just the bookmarks you want, to the computers you want.

Foxmarks is an extension for the Firefox web browser, so if you are using Internet Explorer, you won’t be able to do this. Using Foxmarks, you can create sync profiles, like one for home, one for school, etc. If you’ve got Firefox and Foxmarks on all your computers, you’ll be able to use your sync profiles to sync home books marks with your home desktop and laptop, for example, and just keep school bookmarks on your school computer and the laptop you use at home for school stuff. You’ll also be able to keep all your personal or kids’ bookmarks off of your school computer. Hit the read link for directions on setting up sync profiles.

[Via LifeHacker]

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Someone wise once said, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.” I’m not quite sure where time goes, but I do know it keeps slipping somewhere, especially in a class of 30 kids. Asking questions, talking to students, preparing for the next part of the lesson…all these things can create distractions and send time slipping off somewhere.

One simple way to keep students, and teacher, on track is to use a timer. The problem with conventional timers is that, while they do keep track of time, they don’t easily allow a class to monitor the countdown as it progresses. Some companies have realized this and have created timers that can be displayed on overhead projectors. For a cool $35, you can snag one of these. Or, you can do the same thing for free.

Just use an online timer. The appropriately named Online-stopwatch.com site provides a very simple online stopwatch and timer that you can use to monitor lesson times or student work. The timer can be activated on your computer monitor, and, depending on placement, the entire class will be able to see how much time is left, without having to buy a timer or set up your projector. There is even a full-screen version. When time is up, the screen will flash and a bell will ring, notifying all that it’s time to move on to the next activity.

Beyond the online, Flash-based timer, you can also download a local version of the software, or add a widget to your iGoogle page.

If you ever find yourself, or your students, losing track of time, give this simple, easy-to-use online timer a try. It might help you cut down on all that time slipping into the future. And if you have any other tips for managing time in a classroom, feel free to share in the comments.

Online Stopwatch [Online-stopwatch.com]

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Teachers are often asked by school districts to maintain a presence on the web. Which poses the question: Who is their primary audience? Meet Ima Parent, mother of fourth-grade Jimmy and seventh-grade Suzie. School has started and the kids are coming home with tales of woe of how much work they’re going to have this year. Ima decides to check out their teachers through the school websites they maintain. Firing up the ol’ browser she navigates to her daughter’s science teacher where she finds the class description and expectations. Surprisingly, it says nothing of the three hours of nightly homework and weekly exams Suzie has been describing. She also finds information on a more personal level which further dispels the image of barbed tail and horns painted by Suzie. Ima feels confident that Suzie will survive this seventh grade ordeal. She’s not so sure about herself.

Remember who your primary audience is: Ima Parent. She’ll visit your site frequently and sing your praises when it meets her needs. Update often!

A month into school and Jimmy casually mentions to mom that his teacher just sprung a project on him that’s due this Friday. It’s Wednesday. Jimmy also does not know much about the project as he has misplaced the sheet outlining the particulars. Thanks Jimmy. Ima surfs to her son’s classroom website hoping to shed some light on this predicament. Jimmy, beside her and noticeably uncomfortable, is shocked when mom easily finds the calendar of class events and a printable document describing the project. Apparently, it was assigned last week and it is in fact due on Thursday with a penalty for turning it in Friday. Damage control. Thankfully, the site also has pictures of previously turned in projects for ideas. Jimmy is wishing he knew how to block this particular site from viewing in the same way his mother blocked his favorite online gaming site.

A survey on Suzie’s social studies teacher’s site asks the students if they felt a recent field trip was worthwhile. Wow, a teacher who solicits the opinions of their students? She asks Suzie about it and she replies that this happens often and it’s no big deal. Suzie goes on to say that she has the same survey on her MySpace account and everyone thought it was the lamest field trip. After a thorough grilling regarding the MySpace account Ima decides she’s on information overload.

With the exception of a few stagnant webs, the sites that her children’s teachers maintain have become a valuable tool for Ima. She now has a level of knowledge that was once difficult to attain, often feeling more the FBI interrogator than the interested and involved mother.

Thoughts to Ponder

• The level of implementation varies wildly and teachers may easily be applauded or vilified. “Well, Mrs. Hastoomuchtimeonherhands had a website last year that kept me in the loop on everything!” Most schools have a teacher that has reached the status of “Resident Guru of Technology.” Two simple pieces of advice to help you cross those technology hurdles much easier:

• Reach out to the guru.
• Take copious notes.
  
• Stale websites abound among teachers and all it takes is one trip to a website with last year’s information and it may never be visited again. The web is too dynamic today to not update as often as possible.
• The ability to create and maintain a website depends heavily on the tools and support provided by a district. The playing field is not even among school districts where you’ll find older web editors and ftp protocol in some places and high-end content management systems in others. Find a way to make it happen. Speak with your technology department to see what it is they can do for you.
• Remember who your primary audience is: Ima Parent. She’ll visit your site frequently and sing your praises when it meets her need. Update often!
• Your secondary audience? Suzie and Jimmy. Train them to visit the site as a classroom feature of instruction. Start out small with a tease that gets them there then, as you get better, begin to involve them more as your guide to a better web. You’ll be surprised at how much this improves not only your website but the relationship you have with your students. To be sure, this is a comfortable medium for kids serving as their playground, channel of communication and occasional wall of graffiti.

This is certainly not the last word on this as I’ll explore in greater detail how to accomplish much of what I’ve described here in later posts. Please comment and tell us of your experiences good and not so good.

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Additional Resources: The Fourth Story , Page Creator by Google

Sometimes I need to remember something and I don’t have an opportunity to write it down. Maybe I just don’t have a pen and paper at the moment. Maybe I’m in the car and it just isn’t convenient to write a note. Or maybe I’m just being lazy at the moment. But when I need to remember something and I can’t immediately write a note to myself, I just use this quick trick to tide me over until I can capture the idea on paper:

Grab a random item and let that be your idea placeholder.

Here’s how it works:

1. Grab a random item. Pick something that sticks out and is nearby, like a napkin, remote control, piece of scrap paper, spork, whatever.
2. Put it somewhere that you can see it. Set it on your lap, in the middle of the floor, in the middle of your desk, on your keyboard, even in your pocket.
3. Tell yourself what to remember. When you grab the item, tell yourself what the item represents: “This spork means to call Jeff about the Tigers game.” Tell it to yourself a couple of times.
4. Capture the idea as soon as you can. When you are freed up to write a note, jot down the important information you are remembering using your random placeholder.

This variation of the “ribbon around your finger” method probably isn’t going to help you remember something for longer than an hour, but when you need to remember something and can’t write it down immediately, this trick can keep you from that annoying there was something I was supposed to remember and I can’t remember what feeling.

What tricks do you use to remember important things when you can’t write them down immediately? Share in the comments.

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People generally have a strong preference when it comes to their desktop computer. However, bulk purchasing meant to cut costs determine the platform educational institutions use. Microsoft and Apple have been notoriously unfriendly to the bottom line of school districts for years.

In the back rooms of many school districts sit servers that have worked uninterrupted for years. They’re veritable workhorses that rarely need maintenance or have suffered infiltration by some vicious hacker. It’s a good chance that some form of Linux resides on those machines.

With pressure to upgrade, Linux is beginning to venture out of the back room and onto the desktop. Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 could very well be the answer to the school system at an operating system crossroad. It labels itself as 90% the functionality of Windows Vista for 10% the cost.

With pressure to upgrade desktop stations, Linux is beginning to look good to many schools.

If that’s too steep try the completely free Ubuntu and its variety of sub-distributions such as Edubuntu (the educationally pre-packaged version). This system customarily installs in about twenty minutes and is fast becoming the wunderkind of the Linux world. They’ll even send you a fully bootable CD of the system at their cost if you don’t have the time or the connection to download a copy. Don’t want to install it over your current OS? Run the complete version from the CD!

To be sure, the choice is one for the future as districts begin to look at ways to save the almighty buck.

Here are six compelling reasons to consider Linux as an operating system in your school district:

1. Cost or Lack Thereof. Most versions of Linux are free… in the sense of “free speech” not a “free lunch.” By this I mean that the community that improves on this operating system does it collectively and with passion. “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume…” (Excerpted from the Declaration of Independence). Yikes! A bit heavy for this article.
2. It’ll Surf. Students primarily use the web. Installed desktop applications are becoming passé with all of the innovations from Google and other completely online services such as Zoho and Desktoptwo. They need a reliable machine and they need the internet!
3. Comparable Software. The majority of the software available holds to the same philosophy as the OS: open and free. It is astonishingly easy to find a freely downloadable replacement for a higher-priced commercial product. For the few desktop apps I’d use it would be wonderful to be able to say to my students that this is where you’ll go to download it rather than to this store to buy it.
4. Reliability. Linux has already established a stronghold with many notable companies such as Google, Novell, HP and Oracle to support their website presences on the server side. These companies understand that Linux runs and runs without security breaches and downtime which they can’t afford. Anyone who has ever worked in an IT department knows the sheer panic that ensues when the server is down.
5. Use of Existing Hardware. Linux allows you to use aged hardware thus extending the life of the computer and holding at bay Moore’s Law. I’m currently running SUSE on a three-year old machine and its stunning built-in features designed to increase productivity such as window-tiling and multiple desktops do not miss a beat. I didn’t even have to replace my graphics card as was suggested by the Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor!
6. Appeal. Students need other experiences and in most cases they are the flexible group when it comes to technology. As Linux becomes more and more friendly to use it will begin to wear down the folks who may still be bitter over the fiscally responsible choice.

Further reading:

• Linux definitely has a place in education [Education IT]
• All of our Elementary School workstations run Linux… [Kamloops, BC SD 73]
• San Diego schools pick SUSE Linux desktop [DesktopLinux.com]

“The stapler’s jammed!” a student shouts from across the room. Argh! Now you have to stop everything, fix it for them, locate more staples, go ask the office because you are probably out of staples, and hope that the staple cache lasts to the end of the year. Staplers are one piece of classroom tech that is used frequently, but can oftentimes underperform, causing frustration and time wasting. But being able to staple papers together is an organizational must. So what to do about this little problem?

Use a staple free stapler.

Remember that paper-bending and ripping trick that kept papers together for about 50 seconds? That’s the idea behind the Staple Free Stapler (SFS), except, this time, it works. The SFS punches a tab into the paper, which it neatly bends over and tucks into a slot that it also punches. The SFS works for up to 5 sheets of paper.

Pros:
Holds up to five sheets of paper together, staple-free
Pages can be easily separated
No staples to prick fingers
No staples to purchase or locate
Safe for all ages
No jams to fix
Better for the environment

Cons:
Can only hold up to five pages. For more, one will need…a stapler

This might be a good option for student use, allowing them to staple their work before they turn it in. Placing a SFS with student teams, tables or groups would also save a line at the stapler and get work turned in faster, without having to worry about staple jams or reloads.

See a review at the Gadgeteer. Cheapedia also has several photos and a video review. If you are ready to plunk down the cash, you can snag your own staple free stapler here.

Wrapables Staple Free Stapler [The Gadgeteer]

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Don’t get us wrong. At TeachClever, we’re all about using technology to make us better, more productive teachers. For the most part, we are faster, more efficient and effective due to technology. But Andrew Kantor from USA Today points out that technology can’t, or shouldn’t replace everything. Here are four things that technology doesn’t effectively replace and what it means for teachers:

Spelling. Sure spell check is a wonderful tool for editing, but it’s easy to become dependent on it. Rather than learn to spell words correctly, we just wait for the spell check to tell us we’re wrong. So we never learn to spell those challenging words, like dependent, which I spelled wrong typing this article and let spell check fix it. And I’ll probably spell it wrong again next time.

Teaching students spelling and word study are still valuable skills. Most students will create content digitally in their futures, but there will still be a place for writing by hand. And pausing to think about the correct spelling of a word is a waste of time.

Thoughtful writing. With email and any digital form of writing, we can crank out our ideas with little thought, and then revise later if we don’t like what we see. But sometimes we don’t get to the revising, and send off an email that we later regret. Before computers, people had to think carefully about their word choices, because severe editing was just too hard.

Giving students a chance to write on paper as well as with word processors serves the need for thoughtful writing while still providing opportunities to use the revising and editing advantages of the digital form. It’s OK that students don’t type everything.

Math. Calculators are wonderful for difficult calculations, but no one should have difficulty with basic math facts. Relying on calculators for every math problem keeps students from learning the skills they need to function when electronic aids may not be available. Sure you can crank out the tip on your cell phone tip calculator, but should you need to?

Teachers can help students by having them put away the calculators for all but the most challenging problems. This is probably more appropriate for younger grades that are still learning math facts. And why not leverage the power of technology towards learning math facts, by using a website that provides practice.

Building a knowledge base. Google and Wikipedia are perfect for delivering pinpoint knowledge about a specific question. They are indispensable tools when you know what you are looking for. But there is something to be said for browsing and perusing books. It helps to build up a knowledge base. If you don’t know something exists, it’s hard to search for it online. This doesn’t mean that you can’t do effective general research online. Just that the web is perfect for learning about things you want to learn about, while print materials are great for learning about things you didn’t necessarily seek out in the first place. Put another way, a web search starts with you, you type in the topic. But browsing print materials can lead to unexpected learning that happens when you stumble upon a title that you weren’t actively seeking out. Incidentally, some websites are trying to bring this idea to the web.

Teachers can build up their students’ knowledge base by providing time to read, having a collection of good information books on hand for students to browse, and having students supplement online research with print-based materials.

I’ll be the first to admit that I usually go to technology first when I have a problem to solve or a task to complete. But it’s overkill to go to the computer to check the spelling of a word I should know, jot down a grocery list or write a birthday card, calculate a tip at Cracker Barrel, or browse for undiscovered topics of interest and usefulness. In these cases, using technology makes us less productive. Helping students to know when to use technology and when not to is an important skill that might be getting overlooked.

What other areas can you think of where technology hinders productivity? Share in the comments.

Don’t let technology rob you of the fruits of doing things the hard way [USA Today]

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