Prepping for an inservice presentation, I found The How-To Geek”, a slew of helpful tips for Windows, Mac OS X, Office, Linux, and much more.
For example, I was looking for tips on Microsoft Word, and found Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles, etc.) in Microsoft Word. I did not know you could copy and paste style attributes like that – I knew about it in advanced video editors, but not in Word. A valuable tip.
Stephen Downes points to Software Essentials for the Modern Educator, an exhaustive list of links to mostly free, Windows-only tools for educators. There is a tremendous amount of high-quality software that could allow schools and school systems to save a fortune if they’d do some minimal research, allowing extravagant software licensing fees to go to other costs. I would think that many of the programs linked here would reward a few minutes of careful testing.
Here’s the information: Download SnagIt for Free – Full Licensed Version | Digital Inspiration Technology Guide
It’s a great deal on a not quite up-to-date version that should work well. Windows only.
In a virtual machine on a MacBook Pro, Windows XP Professional took 18 seconds to restart, from choosing “Restart” to the restarted login screen. Dang, that’s fast.
I also just learned that we could take our existing PC configuration, the Windows image that Reginald Brewer installs on all our lab PCs, and convert it to a virtual machine installed on our Macs. If the licensing issues are covered – if the keyserver keeps too many instances of a given app from starting up – then I have a lot less to worry about. This is pretty impressive. I am sure there are gotchas yet to come, and a learning curve to climb, but I am really encouraged.
VMWare also allows Macs to run several virtual machines at the same time: different flavors of Linux; Sun Solaris; they even support more versions of Windows than Microsoft does, as their rep, Brian Whitman says, including Windows 95 and 3.1, if that’s what you need to run an old application, even games. So-o-o many possibilities.