30 in 30: Day 7 - Viewing & Managing Your Bookmarks

Day 7 in the 30 in 30 series will take a look at managing all of those sites that you have bookmarked. Or for those of you that don't use bookmarks, it will open up a whole new world of getting to those sites that you need more easily and efficiently. According to Wikipedia, bookmarks have been incorporated in browsers since the Mosaic browser in 1993, but most have been using Internet bookmarks (or favorites) since Mozilla Firefox introduced live bookmarks in 2004. Newer browsers have expanded the "bookmark" feature to include variations on the concept of saving links.  We are a Google AFE school, so I'm going to stick to Chrome although this will work with Firefox and Explorer.  The Bookmark Bar is a great way to quickly and easily get to the sites that you visit daily or need on a regular basis.  This can be turned on by clicking on the triple dots (or lines) in the upper right hand of Chrome and choosing, Bookmarks --> Show bookmarks bar.  You can also toggle this on and off by using the shortcut - Ctrl + Shift + B.  You can easily add bookmarks to the bar by clicking on the star in the right side of the URL window.  Too much information to try and explain how to edit and manage your bookmarks so I put it in a short informational video.  Click here if you want to know more about editing and managing your bookmarks.

30 in 30: Day 6 - Setting Google Chrome Startup

Day 6 in the 30 in 30 series is going to help you start your day a little more efficiently.  As teachers, we are creatures of habit and masters of routines.  Every morning starts the same....especially when it comes to the sites and tools that I use.  I check my email, load the daily agenda, post an entrance activity and load Pandora to set the mood.  If you are like me and have a set of sites that you start every morning with, I've got the tip for you.  One of the settings in Chrome is the ability to set the pages to use or load "on startup."  In your Google Chrome settings (triple dots or lines in the upper right corner) you will go to settings.  In your settings you will find the ability to choose your On Startup.  You can have Chrome: Open the New Tab page, Continue where you left off or Open a specific page or set of pages.  Setting Chrome to open where you left off or open a specific set of pages will help to save you some time every morning.  Cheers!  And enjoy that extra sip of coffee, tea or soda (yes, some teachers start their day with a Mountain Dew, Pepsi or Coke) before the doors open and kids start to flood the room thirsting for knowledge.  For your more visual learners, click here to watch the video on how this is done.

30 in 30: Day 5 - Going Back In Time ~ The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

Day 5 in the 30 in 30 series is going back in time....well, kind of.  If you are like me you use the Internet as a resource daily.  And if you are like most teachers, just when you need it the most the site that you planned on using for your best lesson of the year will likely not work.  Luckily for you, you have the ability to travel back in time and find the site in working order.  Not just an image of the site, but a complete working site with fully functioning links.  I know...pretty cool, right?  The ability to do this is done at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.  Just type in the site that you want and you will be directed to a timeline of when it has was indexed.  The more popular a site, the more times that it will be indexed.  I must say, if you don't watch the clock this site can be a time waster.  At times I find myself looking at the history of a site.....looking at how web design has changed over the years.  From hand coding a page line by line to using WYSIWYG software like Macromedia's Dreamweaver to now just logging in to a website like Weebly to design and publish a website......from the web.  How times have changed.  If you are wondering where to start, try looking up your school district's page.  How about Google (beta version circa 1998) or Facebook from 2005.  Back when it was Mark Zukerburg's start-up and he was looking for a few employees.  I wonder if they are still looking for a customer support manager?  Click Here if you want to see the video on how to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

** Sites that use SSL or that start with https://  will only give you the login page.  You won't be able to access secure sites in an archived form. **

On a side note, The Internet Archive is more than just the Wayback Machine. According to Wikipedia, The Internet Archive "provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including web sites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books."

30 in 30: Day 4 - Searching a Site

Day 4 in the 30 in 30 series is going to share a trick that I learned a few years ago while teaching a Digital Citizenship unit to seventh graders.  We were doing a scavenger hunt where students had to search a website to find key words or phrases and answer the corresponding questions.  The one site that we had to search {ThinkUKnow} had so many pages to look through it became more frustrating than productive.  Through the frustration came the discovery of the "site:" search tool.  Using the power of Google, you can search for any term or string of words from a particular site.  Rather than just searching Google's millions of indexed webpages, if I know what I am looking for and the website that I want to find it on, I can use the "site:" in the Google search box before what I am trying to search for.  Was super useful for us in class as we knew what site we were trying to search and the terms that we were looking for, just didn't know where to go.  We let Google bring us back just the results from the site that we were looking for.  Pretty awesome search trick.  Click Here to watch the video on how to use the "site:" search to refine your search results to a specific website.

30 in 30: Day 3 - Zooming In & Out in a Browser

Day 3 in the 30 in 30 series is going to stick with the Control key. According to Wikipedia, "a Control key is a modifier key which, when pressed in conjunction with another key, performs a special operation."  Knowing that, what I am about to talk about isn't mind blowing, but it is very useful.  The Control (Ctrl) key performs a lot of shortcuts....and at some point in the next 27 days I will have a post about all of the useful operations and shortcuts of the Ctrl key.  Today we are specifically going to address the ability to zoom in and out.  This works in all of your standard web browsers and in quite a few other software applications.  Holding down the Ctrl & + will zoom in.  Holding down the Ctrl & - will zoom out.  And if you are either zoomed in our out and want to get the zoom level back to 100%, holding down Ctrl & 0 will bring you back to 100.  While most programs have the ability to zoom in and out in a view menu or in the settings, knowing this little shortcut will save you the time trying to find it. Click Here to watch the video on how you can use Ctrl + F to help you quickly find the information that you are looking for.

30 in 30: Day 2 - Control + F to Find what you are looking for

Day 2 of the 30 in 30 series is going to address an underutilized trick to find the information that you are looking for.  Far too often I see teachers scrolling through a document, webpage or .pdf looking for some specific information.  Depending on the size of the document or how specific the information, this could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.  This is where Control + F comes in pretty handy.  This little trick helps you locate a word or phrase just about anywhere.  Not only does it show you how many times it shows up in the document, but it also indicates it on the scrollbar where it shows up.  Click Here to watch the video on how you can use Ctrl + F to help you quickly find the information that you are looking for.

On a side note - where did the phrase, "needle in a haystack" come from?  Did someone at some point have to look for a needle in a haystack?

30 in 30: Day 1 - Ask Where to Save Each File Before Downloading

I have been wanting to do this for some time....30 tools, tricks or tips in 30 days.  No better time like the first day of the new year to get this going.  For the first day, I'm going to keep it pretty simple, yet very useful.  We are a GAFE (Google Apps for Education) school, which means that most teachers are using Google Chrome as their web browser.  By default, Google Chrome just downloads everything to the downloads folder.  Not a big deal if you know this, but a lot of the time we have teachers who download files and are not really sure where they go or how to find them.  To simplify things and to keep it organized, I like to have Chrome ask me where to save each file before downloading so I can put it in a specific place in my Google Drive.  Might take an extra click when downloading, but keeps me organized.  I'm sure "Getting Organized" is a New Year's resolution of a teacher or two.  Hope this tip helps you to get organized for the new year.  Click Here to watch the video on how you can set up Google Chrome to ask you where to save each file before downloading.