The trouble is, not everyone knows that you can easily and freely turn office documents into PDF files. Typically, it’s assumed you need some (expensive) professional software to create PDF files. For example, you could get Adobe Acrobat Pro or Distiller. Not cheap options, and not for the average user.

I was reading the NJEA review that I got in the mail today, and they listed Zamzar as a great resource because, among other things, it can convert documents to pdfs. While this is true, you don’t need an online service like Zamzar. There’s another free option: Open Office.

Within the entire OpenOffice suite, you automatically have the option to save a document as a pdf file. If you create a handout in OpenOffice Writer, you can have a pdf file instantly by hitting the PDF button. If you want to share a presentation, you can open your Impress file and save it as a PDF. It’s built into the OpenOffice suite, in part, because OpenOffice is about using open standards to share information… PDF is an open standard. “.docx” is not.

I still wonder why more schools don’t turn away from expensive, licensed proprietary options when there are perfectly good open source alternatives available. For some students (i.e. graphic design, photography), you’ll want a PC or a Mac that can run the Adobe Creative Suite. For just about everyone else… Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and any number of open source alternatives is a perfect solution. I’d say something like 90% (or more) of students would be perfectly served by a purely open source system.

But it does allow you to open those proprietary file formats (i.e. *.docx, the Word 2007 files). This is a great solution for people that would otherwise be running old versions of Office and don’t want to or can’t install the compatibility pack. One problem that I’ve seen, though, is that people accidentally use the native Open Office file format (i.e. *.odt). This is all well and good in a world where everyone uses the *.odt file… but a lot of people using MS Office won’t be able to open it.

It’s easy enough to save a file as a Word document in Open Office, but it makes life even easier if you set Open Office to do this by default. Here’s how.

Open Up the Options Dialog

First, you’ll need to open up the “Options” menu. You can do this in any form of Open Office (i.e. Writer, Calc, Impress) – it doesn’t matter which part of it you’re using.

Click on the “Tools” menu and then choose “Options.”

Go to Load/Save -> General

On the lefthand side of the Options menu, you should see a bunch of choices – from “OpenOffice.org” at the top to “Internet” at the bottom. The various menus here let you set a lot of options about how Open Office functions.

Look down the list until you see “Load/Save.” There’s a + icon next to it, indicating that you can expand the list and see more options. After clicking on the plus icon, choose “General” from the new list of menus.

Always Save As…

Look to the bottom right for the drop down menu titled “Always save as.”

This is one of two related menus. To the left, you can choose a “Document Type” – i.e. text document, spreadsheet, presentation. By default, text document is selected. The “Always save as” menu lets you choose which format Open Office will use when you create a new text document.

If you want to be compatible with non Open Office users, you probably want to change this to a Word document. Click on the drop down menu, and choose “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP”. Now, all of your Word documents will be save as .doc files.

You may want to do the same thing for Spreadsheets and Presentations, so that both OpenOffice Calc and OpenOffice Impress use the old Microsoft Office format.

The system monitor was showing a weird amount of RAM, but it definitely wasn’t the max (512mb).  When I opened up the bottom of the laptop (where I figured the memory modules should go), I only saw a slot for one memory module.

Weird. I thought in the manual, it said that you could install two memory modules (up to 256mb) for a total of 512mb. So where is this extra memory module?

After digging through the documentation some more, I figured it out. There are two locations for you to install RAM, one on top of the motherboard and one underneath.

The easy to reach place is on the bottom of the computer. Look for the circle labeled “M,” and remove that screw. You can now slide the cover out of the way, and you should see a spot for one RAM chip as well as the built-in modem. When you look in the documentation for how to install a memory upgrade, this is where it sends you.

The other place is more of a pain in the butt to get to. But, it’s certainly do-able once you see the proper instructions.

First, you’ll need to remove the keyboard. You can find the official Dell documentation here.

Next, you need to remove the EMI shield. When you look under the keyboard, the EMI shield is the piece of sheet metal covering the left half of the opening.  Follow the instructions found here in the Dell documentation.

Now you should see another slot for a memory module, the fan (with the processor underneath) and some other random stuff. Install your memory module and carefully put the machine back together.

I’m not 100% sure, since I got this machine after it had been used (and presumably upgraded), but I think the spot underneath the EMI shield is where the original RAM is installed. I found a 64mb board there. The other place was probably empty when the laptop shipped, and that was intended for regular memory upgrades. That would explain why it was so much easier to get too…

Anyhow, now my Dell Inspiron 2600 is running a bit smoother with 512mb of ram (instead of the previous 320mb). When the computer is at rest, Ubuntu is chewing through about 150mb of RAM, leaving 350mb available for applications. For a machine this old, that’ll just have to do.

In the future, I may disassemble the computer again and take some pictures for a more formal write up. In the meantime, use the official Dell documentation. In this case, it’s your friend. The important thing is to note that there are two locations for the memory to go. Although this is stated in the documentation, it’s not very well highlighted and I skipped over that bit of information the first couple of times I read the section on adding new memory.

Now I just need to get a USB wireless dongle working, and this will be all set for use in my classroom. Woot!

I love collecting old computers for use in my classroom. I just found a handful of unused (but not so old) computers in a computer lab at school. They were Dell Optiplex 270′s – Pentium 4, 2.8 ghz, and 1gb of RAM.

Can you believe that the tech coordinator was thinking of tossing them now that we got new computers (which aren’t much better)? To follow up on that post, I built myself a new machine (Core 2 Duo, 2.8 ghz, 4gb RAM, 1gb Video Card) at the end of the summer for $500 (+$100 for a 19″ widescreen LCD monitor). /frown

But hey. Her loss, my gain. I now have four shiny Dell’s in the back of my room. If I can re-arrange things and get the furniture situated, I’ll have 12-14 decent computers connected to the internet in my own classroom. That’s a regular Social Studies classroom.

Back to the topic at hand, though. My mom wanted to help me in my crusade to collect as many old-but-useful computers as possible, so she spread the word at church. One of her friends had some old laptops she wanted to get rid of, and I became the owner of three new-old Dell laptops. Two of them seemed salveagable, but the third was a bit too old even for my taste.

I got one of them working quickly without any trouble. I installed xubuntu and took it into school. I still need to install the extra RAM that I purchased and get the USB wireless adapater working, but until then it’s sitting on the counter, plugged into the network with an ethernet cable and working fine. One of my students in particular loves to work at that laptop, and I can’t figure out why – because it’s the oldest and (relatively speaking) slowest of all the machines in my room.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600

The other useable machine, though, is a Dell Inspiron 2600. It seems that the graphics card in this particular Dell Inspiron is trouble, and it’s (not so) tough to get a Ubuntu install to work. I tried the latest install CD, and I got a blank screen. Umm… uh oh. What do I do?

After some research, I figured out my best bet was to install Ubuntu 8.04 (instead of the latest, 9.10) on the machine. I got a bunch of information from the Ubuntu forums, and some really helpful insights from this post on apfrod.

I burned a new image of the 8.04 Hardy Heron alternate install to a DVD and popped it into the Dell. It booted into the installation, but there were freaky lines across the screen. I ignored them for the moment, and the installation went otherwise smoothly.

When I was done, the computer booted to a blank gray screen. Eugh. I turned the computer on, saw some text and the grub loader, saw a splash screen, and them BLAM. Gray screen. Hmm…

So, I followed the suggestion I found on apfrod and specified a display driver in the xorg.conf file.

To do that, I first booted to the command prompt. To do this, I hit “Escape” while the computer was booting. That let me choose to boot into recovery mode. From there, I told it I wanted to go to the shell prompt.

At this point, I navigated to the /etc/X11 directory. You should be able to do this by typing

cd /etc/X11

I edited the xorg config file by typing

nano xorg.conf

Following the instructions in the apfrod post I changed the following section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

to

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Driver "i810"
EndSection

I rebooted the computer and low and behold… it worked! The gui loaded up perfectly, and I started downloading/installing updates.

Woot! Another working computer for my classroom.

I wanted to make a website for the yearbook club and post some of these photos in galleries. It’s a great way to promote the yearbook and the kids like seeing themselves online. There were some legal issues that I’m working out with the administration, but there were also some technical issues.

Although I obviously can create and host my own website, I don’t have access to web space with php hosting for the yearbook club. I didn’t want to mix school stuff with my own stuff, so I didn’t want to host it here. The simplest solution for me (which I also use for class blogs) was a free blog hosted on WordPress.com.

That is, until I realized that I couldn’t easily embed slideshows from other websites (i.e. Picasa). Doh! The embed and iframe tags that are usually used to include slide shows gets wiped out by WordPress’ security.

I figured out a work around, though. http://www.slideshare.net/ allows you to create and host unlimited slideshows for free. They also offer an option to embed the slideshow into a WordPress blog, and its compatible with a free WordPress.com blog. This solved my technical problems and I don’t have to worry about storage space.

Shortly, I’m going to write up an article about this for Associated Content. I’ll link to it when it’s published. In the meantime, here’s a sample gallery. The pictures are just of my backyard. I’m still working on the legal issues, so I haven’t actually hosted any slideshows of students yet.

For the last two years, we’ve had some version of an autorun virus floating around on the old macs.  When you plugged your flash drive into the mac, it would write an autorun.inf file and a hidden .exe file onto the flash drive.

Now, we’ve upgraded to PCs with Windows XP.  It only took a few months for the entire network to become infected.  I think the tech coordinator may have quashed the virus in the media center computers, but I think it’s still alive and kicking in my classroom.  Unfortunately, due to the user permissions she set, I can’t effectively clean it off my computer.

Instead, I follow a ritual in cleaning the files off my flash drive. If you’re facing a similar problem, check out the quick guide I wrote for Associated Content on how to clean an autorun.inf file off your flash drive. It shows you how to delete the files from a command prompt as well as how to write a batch file to automatically delete the files with a simple click of the mouse.

Recently, I read about some problems that people had with the site last fall (before I started using it). As the Spring progressed, I had also experienced some problems – although nothing like what other people experienced. I found that at times the site was slow (especially during the schoolday), and sometimes the servers would be overwhelmed and they would just reject requests until traffic slowed down.

I still like the idea, though, and I didn’t have time to research/find an alternative, so I began the year using the same system.  So far?  So good.

Connection Issues

Last year, there would routinely be times when I had trouble connecting to the site. The administrators of Engrade said they had updated their server capacity, but I didn’t notice a lot of improvement last year.

This year, things are much better. Every once in a while, I attempt to enter a value into the book and I get an error that the connection was lost. These isolated issues might be due to the crappiness of our school network, I’m not sure. But, I haven’t experienced any kind of blanket blackouts. I’ve used it to take attendance just about every day in every class (early morning, mid afternoon, late afternoon), and it’s always worked at an acceptable speed.

Advertisements

One thing I noted in my initial review (and that some people may be concerned about) is that Engrade is supported through advertisements. They previously showed a small block of Google Adsense ads to students, while these ads were not served up to people logged in as teachers.

That policy seems to have changed slightly, and I now see the ads on my teacher account. It doesn’t bother me much, and I’ve never heard students complain about it. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s some kind of philosophical problem – but nothing is really “free,” and this seems like a small price to pay.

Backups

Even if you’ve got 100% confidence in a system (like Engrade), you had better back up your data. There’s always a fluke chance that something will go wrong, and you don’t want to be stuck at the end of a marking cycle with no grades in your book…

This isn’t too hard to do.  While you’re viewing your gradebook, there’s an option titled “Export to Excel.” This exports all of the data as a .csv file – which stands for comma separated values. It’s not in an actual Excel spreadsheet. The info is sorted into a standard filetype that can be opened and formatted by any spreadsheet/database program. The data won’t be quite as pretty as it was in Engrade, but it will all be there – with the overall grade, each assignment, and each grade for each student for each assignment.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, though. I wish there was an option on the site to export all of your active gradebooks. This would make the backup process less time consuming. I’m wondering if I could write an online script that would access your gradebook, retrieve the csv file, and e-mail it to you…

Printing the Gradebook…

This is my biggest pet peeve about Engrade, and probably the only reason I would consider going to another system. At the end of the year, I’m required to hand in a hard copy of my gradebook.

While you can print out your gradebook, there’s no simple way to print out the whole thing. The online chart only shows 8 assignments at a time, and you need to print each page of the gradebook separately. Last year, that took me a good hour or two to print out the reports for my last two semesters.

This year, I’m going to see if it’s easier to export the gradebook to Excel, slap some formatting on it, and print it out that way. If it is, I’ll post up how to do that. But I wish Engrade had a standard way to print out all of your active gradebooks… or at the very least to print out the entire gradebook for one class.

Bottom Line – Good, Bad, Ugly?

I’m still quite pleased with the system. My students love it. If they don’t physically see the grades, they often have no concept of what they’ve done, what they haven’t done, and what grade they’re getting in the class. This fixes that problem straight off.

It’s hard to argue with a poor grade when 90% of the assignments are labeled “Missing.” It also gives them a clear roadmap to improve that grade – handing in all those missing assignments.

There are some minor pet peeves that annoy me (only being able to export/backup one gradebook at a time, not being able to print the gradebooks easily), but these are outweighed by the positives. This year, I’ve had no trouble with connections, and I’m confident that my data is secure. I’ve had more problems in the past with (almost) losing papers, flash drives, and dead hard drives.

With that in mind, I’m happy to leave my main gradebook on a secured cloud server, and let them worry about not losing it.

School is back in session, and already I here teachers and students complaining about these incompatible file formats. Students who have new computers at home bring in their .docx Word 2007 files, and they find that they can’t open them on the computers in the school’s media center. Doh!

Teachers, to, have this problem when students e-mail in or otherwise submit papers in this new format. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Microsoft Office (which costs a pretty penny to get legally), you’re golden. Otherwise, you might be staring at a file you can’t open and grade.

What to do? Building on what I said last December, here are three solutions to your problem…

Ditch Microsoft Office – Get OpenOffice

My first piece of advice is to ditch the expensive, proprietary Microsoft software altogether and start using OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free, fully-functional, open source office suite.

It comes with a word processor (Writer), presentation software (Impress), spreadsheet program (Calc), drawing program, and database engine. It’s more or less a free and legal replacement to Microsoft Office.

The newer versions of OpenOffice also have the extra benefit of being able to open all the latest files from Microsoft Office 2007. You can open a .docx file, read it, and (if you want) save it in a different file format (.doc, .odt, etc). This works great for Word documents, although OpenOffice is not as good at opening/converting Power Point slideshows. The information is retained, but much of the formatting is lost in the conversion.

Get the Compatibility Pack from Microsoft

If you really want to stick with Microsoft, but don’t want to upgrade to the latest version of Office, you can get a compatibility pack from Microsoft.

This compatibility pack will update your older version of Microsoft Office and allow it to open up the new, .docx and .pptx formats. I’ve had trouble installing it on my official school computer, though, because it wants me to have administrator access (which my log-in account does not). Our one tech coordinator is also over-whelmed with trying to service 200+ computers, so she can’t do it.

As a result, I stick with OpenOffice on the other desktops in my classroom and open the new files from there.

Convert It Online

A third alternative is to use a service like Zamzar to convert the files for you.

At Zamzar, you upload the file to their server and let them do the conversion. After a short while, you will receive an e-mail with a link to the converted file. If you have a lot of files to convert, this can be burdensome, but it’s perfectly useable for one or two files.

In addition, you can use this to convert older incompatible file types to newer ones. For example, I had a few students who had Microsoft Works at home, which uses the .wps file format. This wasn’t compatible with the Microsoft Word on my school computer or the OpenOffice Writer on my other computer. With Zamzar, I was able to convert it to a .doc file and open it.

Pick a Standard File Format

There you have it. Three alternative methods of opening and/or converting .docx files so that you can read them.

The simplest advice I have, though, is to tell your students to use a standard file format! The simplest format to use is .doc – Word 97/2000/XP. This is compatible with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. As long as the file is in this standard, universally recognized format, you won’t have trouble opening it.

Or, better yet, have them write up their document on Google Docs and read it online.

It turns out that Acer got busy, and they just got around to calling me to wrap up the promotion – about two and a half months after I received the unit.  I need to call them back on Monday to provide some feedback on my experience and make arrangements for the netbook they sent me.

My opinion?  Awesome.  I love the netbook.  I wrote up a review – with educators in mind – on Associated Content.  Check it out.

The arrangements?  I plan on buying it.  No doubt.  Now that I’ve used it at school and at Rutgers, I couldn’t imagine not having this nifty little toy.  So much better than my old, large, desktop-replacement laptop.

Something about teaching, two advisorships (including the yearbook), home ownership, and two graduate classes just sucks the energy out of me. When I make it home, if I don’t have work to do for school or around the house, I just don’t have the energy to sit down and write. For a while, I was doing some short pieces about Fallout 3 in the Nerds at Play category, but I couldn’t muster enough oomph to dive into any deep articles about education or web design.

Although I love blogging, and I really hoped that combining all of these sites into one site would help me keep up with it, it doesn’t fit into my life at the moment. Too much going on.

However, I’m still not ready to just drop the whole web dev bug altogether. Which means it’s time for a new direction.

One problem I’ve found with a blog is that there’s a push to post regularly. What good is subscribing to a blog if there are no posts for weeks at a time? I know I’ve unsubscribed from other people’s sites because of weeks of downtime.

Instead of blogging – at least as a main venture – I’ve decided to shift to smaller, one-off sites. Theses mini-sites will probably be 5-20 pages in size, and they probably won’t include a blog/weekly articles section.

Why Shift from a Blog to Static Sites?

First, I’m not pressured to work regularly. When I have a lull from my other responsibilities, I can sit down and work on a site. If I’m busy, I can wait a week or two. There’s no pressure to have it done right now.

Second, it’ll let me work on my web development skills. Since creating this site, I haven’t done a lot of fiddling with designs and programming. Creating new sites every month or two will give me an excuse to break out some of those design skills and sharpen them.

Third, I can create some revenue through text links like TNX. I’ve ear-marked online revenue for electronics and supplies that I use in the classroom, so I’d like to continue to make some extra pocket cash this year. I think this mini-site model will yield more profit per time invested.

So No Blogging… At All?

I wouldn’t say that. It’s just not going to be my main project.

I definitely want to create a sustainable education blog. As I get started on this doctoral program, I know that I need to get out there and get my name and my work recognized by a larger audience than my Rutgers professors. I’m unsure if it’ll be here or located somewhere else, but in the next year or so I definitely plan on working on that.

I’ll probably also create a minimalistic personal blog to track all of my projects. I may re-vamp this site over the summer to fulfill that role. I’ll write quick updates about new projects going up, share lessons learned about web dev, and ponder about new project topics. It’ll more or less be a place for self-reflection about the whole process.

So… don’t expect to see a lot around here in the near future. I may stop in from time to time, but the days of posting something on a daily basis are unfortunately gone. They were fun, but short lived.