The Direct Marketing Association has up a helpful list of links on how to remove your name from various mailing, calling and email lists. It does seem a little like tobacco companies helping people to stop smoking, but if you are getting a lot of junk mail or other unsolicited communications, these suggestions might save a little time and a few trees.

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People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay. It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays.

The next time you’re feeling unrested during the school week, try maintaining the same wake-up time, even over the weekends. And while you still have a little time left before the school year starts, it might be a good idea to get that school wake-up time going pretty soon! Hit the read link for the full article.

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One simple and fast way to try and save a little on your next purchase is to search the net for an online coupon code.

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Allergies virtually always cause itchiness, in the eyes, the nose, the throat, while a cold generally does not. Telltale signs of a cold are a fever, aches and colored mucus.

Click the read link for the full article.

[Via LifeHacker]

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TeachClever is not about tech hacks, per se; it’s a blog about making teachers more productive and efficient. But it includes a healthy selection of tech tips for the classroom that make it a great stop for a project pick-me-up.

Click the read link to view the entire article, which includes links to DIY sites such as Instructables, and a demo of a pretty cool “Minority Report” type grab-in-the-air interface using a Wiimote and some Radio Shack skillz.

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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.

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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.

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What is it?

In a nutshell, a mission statement tells who you are, what you are doing, and why.

How long should it be?

Mission statements have a tendency to either get wordy and confusing or general and meaningless. This has prompted some to debate the value of mission statements. Or make fun of them. But when done right, they are useful. And most gurus in this area seem to say that “done right” means people should be able to remember what the mission statement says:

The mission statement is one thing that should be known by every person in the organization. You should be able to go up to any individual in the organization and he or she should be able to recite the mission to you.

It should always be brief, so that it can be remembered.

How to make a mission statement in five simple steps

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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. (more…)

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

Here’s how it works:

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Okay, we’re back. Collecting information and research sure is different than it used to be. In fact, it’s a lot different, according to a recent survey:

Seventy-one percent of teens say the Internet is their primary source for information for completing their most recent school project or report. Research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that teens are increasingly using the Web as an essential study aid outside the classroom. For instance, 78 percent say the Internet regularly helps them with classroom assignments…

While this doesn’t mean completely eliminating the old methods of research and organization, it does mean that students should be taught how to effectively use the web for research. They are already doing it, so let’s help them do it better. But that’s not the only reason. Accessing information online will only grow in the future, and it will be imperative for their future careers to be able to effectively collect and organize information online.

If you are planning on your students doing any type of research in your class(es), then why not also introduce them to a way to organize that information online? You will not only be targeting language arts standards, but technology standards for information literacy as well. Here are 12 resources for information collection and organization:

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You could go to eBay. But you have to pay listing fees and deal with the hassle of shipping your items to their purchasers. For a quick, easy and free way to sell your stuff online, try a location-based classified ad site instead.

These sites allow users to post classified ads to a specific geographic location. While the pool of potential purchasers is smaller than with eBay, the advantage is that the listings are free and the inconvience of shipping is usually eliminated as your purchaser can just swing by to pick up their item.

If you want to give this a shot, try these two free online classified ad sites:

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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:

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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.

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Just because you have space to store an object doesn’t mean that you should.

So if you are looking for places to starting decluttering your classroom, here are a few ideas:

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Yuck! That’s from an NPR report and they have a pretty extreme solution to the problem: just toss your keyboard in the dishwasher! While you may not want to do that with school equipment, having 30 pairs (or more) of grimy-fingered hands all over your classroom or lab computer keyboards might make you wonder what’s growing in there.

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