You may have noticed last term that one of our fantastic Teachers Aides (she better be reading this now that I’m showering her with praise, but given that she’s on long service leave, she probably isn’t) had a list of useful keyboard shortcuts to use with different programs.

I was lead myself today to such a list, and quite a definitive one at that.  You see, this one’s from Microsoft, who I think should have a good idea of what the Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows and Microsoft Programs are.  You might like to take a look and learn one or two.  They really do help maximise your time on the computer as they save you from having to reach for your mouse so often.

I’ve also posted the link on our staff del.icio.us page.  Take the time to go through some of the 569 links (to date) there.  Judy’s done a fantastic job in drawing together these resources.

Monday afternoon will see our second del.icio.us workshops held in 4/5K. Please bring your laptop with you, because you’ll be setting up an account with the social bookmarking site.

Cherie and Rebecca have kindly offered to help you through the sign up in my absence. It’s so easy, however (it’s all done in three steps), that you could do it yourself!

In fact, if you can’t make it tomorrow afternoon and want to do it yourself, let me direct you to a few resources that will show you what to do.

Tech-Ease, from the University of South Florida, have a series of simple videos that show you everything from registering to using subscriptions.

• You can also subscribe to the movies as podcasts through the iTunes store.

The Tech-Ease video is done using the Apple Mac browser, Safari. The installation of the buttons is a little different in Internet Explorer, but still easy to do. Here’s how it’s done on the del.icio.us site. Don’t worry too much, though; installing the buttons is part of the sign-up process.

Photo: Thumbnails in del.icio.us

I hope everybody’s enjoying their holiday at the moment. I’ve already seen a couple of people, but I know I’ll catch up with more of you during the week.

I’ve just been looking at a few things and thought about where we’ve got to so far with CENet. A number of classes are already under development, and it may be that you will want to start sharing those classes with others very soon. This may involve giving your colleagues access rights, or even rights to assist you in maintaining the class.

To help you with this next step, I’ve put together a little video which shows you how it’s done. This was made with a fantastic piece of software called Jing. Jing’s is a free program available for Windows or Mac that can take still images of your computer desktop, or record short movies with sound of what you do on your desktop. The movies can then be saved in a flash format and shared with others (like we’re doing here!). It could be a great tool for capturing a demonstration of something you want children to do on the computer for their later reference. It could also allow students to capture how they do something on the computer so the rest of the class can learn how - endless possibilities!

swf (Flash) file, 5MB

Thanks to those who came to this week’s Multimedia Monday sessions and started with signing up to blogs.

One thing that came up was blog privacy, and excluding your class blog from search engines and the like.

When using edublogs, there is a process in the admin controls that you may want to enable.

1. Click on the “Options” tab
2. Click on the “Privacy” sub-tab
3. Tick the box next to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”
4. Click on the “Update options” button

This process means it’s far more likely that people can’t find your blog simply by googling it, but would need to know the address (or follow a link to it from another site, such as perhaps our school website or Intranet).

We’ve included a screen shot with the steps marked out to help you with this simple process.