Keep Up-To-Date!

Apple, unlike Microsoft, sends out Software Updates very often. They send out updates to their hardware and software regularly. Your Macbook must stay up-to-date at all times. These patches prevent poor performance and fix problems that have been discovered. All operating systems have flaws. OS X is no exception. The BPS has designed it’s OS X image to only allow updates when you are connected to the BPS Network! You must be connected to your school to receive an update. If you have not connected to the network for some time, you should do so at least once a week. Keep an eye on some of the sites that I have provided. When an update has been released, you will find out on several sites.

You can always check to see if there is a new update available by “clicking” on the black apple at the top left corner of the screen. Then select “software update.” Your computer will check to see if anything is available. If you connect at school on a daily basis, you will receive these updates automatically.

Your Second Dashboard

When Dashboard is activated, the user's desktop is dimmed and widgets appear in the foreground. Like application windows, they can be moved around, rearranged, deleted, and recreated (so that more than one of the same Widget is open at the same time, possibly with different settings). New widgets can be opened, via an icon bar on the bottom of the layer, by dragging a widget icon out into the layer. After loading, the widget is ready for use.
Dashboard uses a variety of graphical effects for displaying, opening, and using widgets. For instance, a 3-D flip effect is used to simulate the widget flipping around, by clicking on a small "i " icon in the right bottom corner, the user can change the preferences on the reverse side; other effects include crossfading and scaling from icon to body (when opening widgets),a "spin cycle effect" when a widget is focused and the user presses Command-R or a suck-in effect when they are closed.
Another nice feature in Dashboard is "Web Clip." Clip out any portion of a web page and turn it into a Dashboard widget. Just click the new Web Clip icon in Safari and select the portion of the page you want, then click Add to see your Dashboard spring to life with a brand-new widget. The widget is “live” and will update as its page of origin does. You can even customize your widget’s frame. You can only use Web Clip with Safari, Web Clip will not work with any other browser. You can find additional information about Dashboard here.

Apple Mac Wins in Popular Mechanics Test

The Verdict: Apple

Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did. Popular Mechanics
Read the full article here.

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning?

"Students continue to be on the leading edge in terms of adopting, modifying and re-using digital content and technology tools to enrich both their personal and educational lives. The students in many ways are far ahead of their teachers and parents not only in the sophistication of their technology use, but in the adoption of emerging technologies for learning purposes," said Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans, in a statements released to coincide with the survey release. "It is in our nation's best interest that we support and facilitate student usage of technology for learning."
-Read the full article here

Get More Attention

Comic life is a really easy way to turn your boring old digital photos into mini works of art. It's great for turning your holiday or family snaps into funny comic books that you can print, email or publish to the web using iWeb or .Mac. As well as its entertainment value, Comic Life can have a serious purpose in creating informative, easy to follow how to guides as well as being a great desktop publishing package. You'll find kids will love its flexibility and because it's so easy to use, Comic Life has carved out a special niche in the education market as a super educational tool for all ages. You can find a nice "demo" tutorial on just how Comic Life works at ScreenCastsOnline.com

Find Help for Your Class

EdHelper boasts a comprehensive collection of links to instructional materials in all subject areas. The site currently has more than 1,000 WebQuests, 6,200 lesson plans, and almost 7,000 other resources. This site was definitely created with the busy teacher in mind. It is a one-stop shopping plaza for lesson plans and activities for any subject from animals to technology. All the links are briefly annotated. Teachers are invited to submit their own lesson plans as well as use the teacher tools to create math and vocabulary work sheets. Currently, the worksheet generators are capable of creating eight different kinds of work sheets for classroom use. There is also a link to free Teacher's Toolbox software, ClassBuilder. Resources are categorized according to subject area, and an onsite search tool helps users find specific information quickly. There is also a collection of links to current educational news.

My Macintosh does Windows!

When Apple decided to switch to Intel chips in all of it’s hardware, they changed to level of acceptance towards Macintosh computers for ever. In the past sales quarter, Apple computers saw a 40% increase in sales over the previous year. Macintosh computers have increased their market share from less than 5%, just a few years ago to a predicted 15%. Many believe the major contributor to this rise is the move to Intel. Intel has given Macintosh computer the speed to match or surpass equally equipped Windows machines.

After the induction of the new Leopard Operating system (10.5.X), end users were presented with a platform that was easy to use, powerful, and fast. Apple introduced “Boot Camp” in April of 2006. Boot Camp allows the user to install Windows XP on any internal disk. On startup, the user would select which operating system they wanted to use. This feature gave “switchers” the comfort of installing their existing Windows software on their new Macs.

Although Boot Camp allows for full speed access to Windows, it requires the user to reboot the computer to switch between the two operating systems. This is not the most convenient way to work. Enter Parallels and later VMWare. The Intel Core 2 CPU family has virtualization built in. Virtualization allows a computer to emulate and operating system in a virtual space. The power of this new feature is that now the end user did not have to reboot their system to access the other operating system. Users only need to start Parallels and select which OS they wanted and it would boot in a window on their OSX desktop. The user could then use this OS in a window or switch to full screen. All the time OSX is waiting in the background. The speed of the virtual OS is not full speed. Your speed will depend on the application running. Office type application will appear to run at full speed. Graphic applications will show a slightly slower speed.

There are some drawbacks to using a virtual machine like Parallels. A system using virtualization must have ample ram to coexist on one computer. Parallels allows the user to adjust the of memory level for each virtual machine. Your Macbook’s Windows XP Professional has been assigned 768 megabytes of ram. When XP is running you will have about 1 ¼ gigabytes left. Windows XP lives in a folder in your document folder. This folder will automatically expand, as more space is required for XP.

Take a Snap shot while you running XP on your Macbook. Snap shot is a feature that will backup your current partition in case something bad happens. With Parallels Desktop 3.0’s Snapshot Manager, you can manage and view all of your snapshots in a tree pane that includes screen shots for each snapshot. Snapshot Manager enables you to revert back to previous snapshots, delete snapshots, and edit description information for each snapshot.

Snapshots are excellent for:

• Bulletproofing your Windows virtual machine from viruses and spyware
• Creating a regularly scheduled backup to revert your virtual machine to any previous stable state
• Rolling back your virtual machine after a software update, system crash, or software testing

In an unpredictable world, Parallels Desktop 3.0’s Snapshots safeguards your data and creates a more reliable virtual machine so you can focus on more important things.

Another Video/Voice Option

Skype 2.0 for Mac supports free audio and video calls to any other Skype users, regardless of what platform they’re running Skype on. You can have conference calls with up to four people at a time for free and send files and photos to one another.
Skype enables users to not only call other Skype users but also make and receive calls to and from landline phones and cell phones. That service costs extra — you must register for a “SkypeIn” number to accept calls from the outside world, and purchase “SkypeOut” credits in order to make calls. The pay-to-play service also provides its own voicemail, so you can record messages when you can’t take calls, and forward your Skype calls to a landline or mobile number.

Skype does a great job with video, perhaps better than iChat. Remember, you can call or video chat, Skype to Skype anywhere in the world for free!

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. Originated by UserLand in 1997 and subsequently used by Netscape to fill channels for Netcenter, RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more). RSS solves myriad problems webmasters commonly face, such as increasing traffic, and gathering and distributing news. RSS can also be the basis for additional content distribution services.

There are several ways to receive RSS feeds. Your Mail application on your Macbook (Mail.app) can handle the job for you. Just go to file and select “add RSS feeds.” Your RSS feeds will now be available with your mail. An alternative way to receive RSS feeds is with a feed reader. NetNewsWire is a very popular application for this task. NNW was once a pay product, is now available for free. You can also subscribe to this site. The link for M4M is available and the bottom , or you can just click on the title of this story. In addition, Look in your URL window at the top of this page. You will see an orange icon at the right of the address. If you hover over that icon, you will see "subscribe to this page." Selecting this icon will give another option for capturing your news. Live Bookmarks. Live bookmarks will add a category to bookmark in your browser. You browser will periodically check for new additions to the pages that you have subscribed to. You can find a demonstration of RSS in Mail.app here. Enjoy your news!

Enhance Your Content in Class!

Take a look at the March 21st post “What is a Podcast.” Podcasts are a treasure chest overfilled with content. Apples have added a new feature in the iTunes Store. You will find iTunes University (iTunes U) now available to you. You will find content from over 50 colleges and universities that is provided “free” of charge. This content include both sound and video.
Apple describes iTunes U as “a free, hosted service for colleges and universities that provides easy access to your educational content, including lectures and interviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” The service is based in iTunes and is navigated and used just like the iTunes Music Store. In addition to the content provided from colleges, you are also offered material “Beyond Campus” from other sources. In “Beyond Campus,” you will find content from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, National Science Digital Library, Supreme Court Media, Public Broadcasting System, Smithsonian Global Sound, New York Public Library, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

iTunes U. will provide content to enhance your Language Arts, Physics, History, Mathematics, Dance, Law, Music, Political Science, Religion, Theatre, Ecology, Engineering, Economics and many other offerings in class. Please explore for yourself,

You will need to invest in a mini DVI to VGA Adapter. This device will set you back $19. Please pay close attention to the connector on your projector. The adapter is also available in the digital version as well, mini DVI to DVI. Check your manual if you are unsure of which version to get. Most projectors in the BPS require a VGA adapter.

This is a fantastic resource that is provided to you for free!

Presentation Alternative

Have you ever used Powerpoint? The problem with PowerPoint is that almost every presentation looks the same. PowerPoint is very powerful, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes you just want something different. Say you have to do a presentation and you want “pop.” You would have to work very hard to give PowerPoint a different look to your audience. Enter Keynote, Apple’s presentation program.

If you have ever seen Steve Jobs’ presentations or Al Gores’ “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation, you were looking at Keynote.

Though the program looks and feels quite new, it really follows the same presentation paradigm established by PowerPoint so many years ago. First you choose (or create) a theme for your slide show, then you build it using text, graphics, sound, and video as you see fit (provided your trusty computer can handle the load). With your Mac hooked up to a TV or projector you can thrill audiences with your masterwork in person, or you can save it in some self-presenting format for streaming or downloading across networks or the Web.
Again, nothing groundbreaking here. But with Keynote, you’ll discover that you can do almost everything you did in PowerPoint with less effort, better results.
You have Keynote, why not try it.

Free Tutorials Online!

There is a popular teaching tool that is very popular training tool on the Macintosh. Sreencasting has become the rage. Visit the L4L Website for an examples of screencasts. There is also a free site that offers over 150 video tutorials dating back to 2005. ScreenCastsOnline is wonderful free resource that you can enjoy whenever you like.

You have a choice. You can watch the programs on the website or subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes, and watch them on your computer, or your iPod. ScreenCastsOnline offers additional programs for a fee, but there are plenty of free programs to keep you busy. Lets look at an example. Show 142 covers the Apple made word-processor Pages.

Pages is a very powerful word-processor. Pages can read and write Word documents (.doc, .docx Office 2007). Pages has been included in your L4L Macbook. Watch the Screencast and give Pages a try. If like Pages, you can change the association for .doc files to Pages. Then when you click on a document, Pages will load.

Digital Photos Made Simple

Your Macintosh comes with an easy to use photo application called iPhoto. You will find the icon on your dock at the bottom of your screen. When you first run iPhoto, it will ask if you want the application to open when you attach a camera. This is a good idea, unless you plan on using another application to store and modify your photos. When you connect your camera and upload your photos, photos will be stored in Events

Events are a very clean way to help organize your photos into more manageable groups. Basically, iPhoto takes the information from your photos and groups them together by the day the photos were taken. Once they are grouped together, you can “skim” through an event by moving your mouse across the event, giving you a quick glimpse at every photo in that event.

Usually this will put the “event” that you were at (i.e. - wedding, birthday party, etc.) all together in one collection of photos. If the automatic sorting doesn’t quite do the job (say the event lasted more than 1 day, or only part of the day’s photos were from a specific event), it is very easy for you to either add photos to an event (by simply dragging them into the event), or separating them (by selecting the first picture you want separated and simply clicking “split”).

There are also some fantastic new printing options that give you the power of a portraits studio right on your Mac. You can print mats, multi-picture layouts, and more with just a few clicks.