Betty’s Bytes

As I wrote in my last post, our school division is migrating from XP and Microsoft Office 2003 to VISTA and Office 2007. For many of the employees, this will be a drastic change in the way Office products look on the screen, so training is an absolute must for some, but not for all; many teachers and students have purchased the 2007 (or 2008) versions and are using them at home. For those of you, however, who are so comfortable with Office 2003, Microsoft has a step-by-step Microsoft from Scratch Web tutorial. At your leisure, you may wish to begin looking at the 2007 version that will become part of your everyday life in the near future.

Reading Richard Byrne’s blog Free Technology for Teachers, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to work in a school district that supports and encourages the use of technology by providing great resources. In a school district with more than 70,000 students, the challenge to maintain and keep the technology resources current is daunting. As Microsoft prepares to introduce a new operating system, our school district is testing Vista with our current hardware and software and preparing to migrate to Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, while some of our students are already using Office 2008 at home. In addition to the paid resources provided by the district, Richard Byrne’s blog provides a great source of free information for teachers; one recent article will help you sort through the information available online and help you to avoid wasting time, a precious commodity for educators.

When you find a site on the Internet that you would like to revisit, you have several options available to you, one of which is to bookmark the page in your Web browser. These bookmarks can become almost unmanageable, even though there is an organization function; and bookmarks on one computer are not available on another, unless you export them from one to import to another. Another option is to keep your bookmarks online at sites such as portaportal, pageflakes, or delicious; you can share your bookmarks with others as I have at portaportal. These bookmarks are available only when you are online unless you download them to your computer, which is only a concern to those who may have links to internal sites on their networks.

Finally, the point of this posting – RSS communicates information that you select to you! Instead of you searching through old bookmarks to try to find updated topics or sites of interest, RSS provides them for you to review and read. RSS – What is it? was posted by Richard Byrne to provide a guide to RSS. You will see how easy it is to use, and perhaps you will try it by using the RSS feed on this site to subscribe to my newsletter.

We all get busy and may forget to read the feeds subscribed through RSS, but then at your leisure you can go back and read what you have missed. Google Reader and Outlook are the venues I have chosen to read my feeds, but there are a host of others. Richard Byrne has included a video about RSS on his site along with applications for education. Visiting this link is well worth your time; and for more information, Google has published a simple, straightforward explanation of feeds and RSS.