DV for Teachers

We knew this day was coming, and it’s about time. Teachers Using Cell Phones For Class Lessons, Homework.

Ken Stone offers another screenshot-rich tutorial opening up some intricacies of Final Cut Studio. This time it’s Compressor 3.5 Basics. I’m still using 3.0.5, and a cranky unreliable crash-prone beast it is, but I don’t want to upgrade with several projects still incomplete. I hope to upgrade by January though. (January! Only 38 days away! Yikes!)

The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

In Supporting your family, Macworld’s Chris Breen offers excellent tips for anyone seeking help with a computer. If you’re the tech support for family (and we’re about to surprise Mom with an iMac; she won’t see this because her existing ancient hand-me-down PC is unusably slow), or you’re just a user with problems of your own, the article offers excellent guides for first steps as well as how to deal with support techs. A terrific takeaway suggestion: take a photo of the problem as it occurs on-screen and print it out and take it with you. Worth a thousand words!