I am starting to find this Digital Editions a useful tool as my pdf files are in the hundreds. It is relatively new, free and has an OSX and Windows version. It allows you to create categories and stores alias copies in these categories in a nice visual format. It is quite functionally basic but is ideal for the purpose of categorisation and easy access to these documents.
I often find myself creating many pdf’s in many of the softwares that I use for teaching, etc on the Mac and rather than print I often save as pdf from the internet, so for like people I think it is a good time saving tool well worth the free price.
Have a Good One STeve

A quick tip for anyone making use of the handy tool Picasa.
Now you can download Picasa2flickr from SourceForge, and you will be allowed to (you guessed it!) upload your photos straight from picasa to flickr!

This is a very handy enhancement for busy teachers. Since picasa is so easy to use (and can do so many simple image editing things ‘on the fly’), being able to hit the button and upload to flickr is a nice enhancement!

With Adobe’s announcement last week of it’s intention to produce a scaled down web-version of PhotoShop I thought I’d have a look at a couple of examples of what is out there already. Picnik and Snipshot a couple of web2.0 online image editors I’ve come across. Both of these apps have interfaces that are very intuitive and my gran could probably be left for 5 minutes to work out how to use them.

Does anyone have any other examples of online image editors they’d like to share?

Is this a piece of mischief? I don’t know, but another Digital Chalkie might!

But for now I recommend you try the Very Useful Tips to speedup your Firefox from Ubantu Geek.

Since I use three different browsers I was game enough to experiment with this to see if I could improve my browsing speeds.

How does this compare with Firefox 2? I don’t know! So far I am happy with the result.

Anyway……. maybe you would like to try one or other of these options…and provide some feedback.

As part of Apples iWork software Keynote has come a long way over the past couple of years and I thought it would be good to share some of the diferent ways it has been used at my school. Many school Apple users do not have iWork as they are provided with MS Office but we are finding over time, that more students out of choice are using Pages instead of Word and Keynote instead of Powerpoint. Keynote definately is a favourite with many of our students so much so that I discovered that our electronics students have started drawing their circuit diagrams in Keynote. Trust students to find a little niche use for a software not really conceived for this application. On further investigation I found that their teacher decided to follow their lead and now it’s widely used. They are able to use the line and shape tools quickly and precisely with the alignment tools helping them and the adjustable freeform line tool for tricky stuff. The circuits can be grouped and easily scaled. It can be printed to different scales to match their PCB (circuit board).

Our Visual Art Teacher in photography came up with another novel use where students took photographs of body parts and made stick people and then after cropping the body parts placed them over the stick body parts creating photographic stick people and then animated them by playing a fast slide show. It is possible to animate it better by saving each slide as an image and importing into iMovie as you can have much faster frame rates in iMovie. However as an introductory task this was great fun for students and developed many skills.

Besides using it for presentations, digital portfolios, etc, I have found it a great asset for creating variations of vodcasts. My media students often use it to turn static media into moving media to import into their iMovies. In case you are not aware it can open powerpoints and export in many formats such as pdf, a quicktime movie, powerpoint file, png images, swf, HTML and to iDVD to be part of a DVD. Definately a worthy piece of software and if you have Apple OSX it is well worth purchasing.