Saturday, April 28, 2007

Symposium Promotional PostCard

A promotional postcard is being emailed out to invite participants to register to attend the Symposium 2007 event. And to submit a proposal to present.

If you didn't receive a postcard or the images got mangled through the email then click here to view it.

The online registration using SPORG is now open at http://adeta.org/symposium/registration.html

This is going to be a great event. Don't miss it.

Rod

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Second Life International Education Conference! May 25, 2007

Planning is currently underway for the first Second Life International Education Conference! The focus will be on best practices in teaching, learning and research. Click here for more information.

The conference will be held on May 25, 2007 in venues all over the Second Life world, with exciting presentations, vendors and exhibitors, and everything an educator needs to know to get started exploring the possibilities for teaching, learning, and research in Second Life!

There is no cost to participate in this conference but you do need to sign up for a Second Life identity or account, which is free. Go to http://www.secondlife.com for that.

Rod

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Zamzar: a free online file conversion tool

Zamzar is a free online file conversion tool that allows you to convert Document, Image, Music and Video Formats without having to download any software. With this site you convert MS Office documents to PDF, or Open Office and MS Works documents to Word. So if a student sends you an assignment that you can't open you can convert it with this tool. You can also convert PowerPoint files into Flash movies.

The scary conversion is that you (and your students) can convert PDF files that shouldn't be editable to an editable Word, RTF or HTML document. See a list here.

This site also supports batching up several files to be converted at once.

Zamzar also has the ability to convert videos from sites like Google Video and YouTube.

The interface is super easy to use. First, you upload the file you want converted (or provide the URL), second, you select the format you want to convert it to and then you supply your email address where you will be notified when you can download the converted file. You can't convert files bigger than 100 MB and you have 24 hours to pickup your file.


Saturday, April 14, 2007

Call for Proposals Out for October Symposium


The call for proposals is justing going out for presenters at the Distributed Learning in the 21st Century: Shaping the Future of Learning Symposium taking place October 17 to 19, 2007 in Edmonton.

The due date is May 14th to get them in. Please consider sharing some of your insights, research and/or practices that will help us Shape the Future of Learning.

All presenters will receive a discount on their registration fees.

Click here for more details.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Download Free Web Design Templates from OSWD.org

Sometimes, when I discover things that other people tell me about, I feel like I must be the last to know about these things. This is one of those. Did you know that you can download free templates from websites like http://www.oswd.org/ that you can use to make your own sites look like a professional designer designed it? Terri Brown told me about this site. She just recently used a template from this site for the new http://www.adeta.org/symposium website that looks wonderful. Especially compared to the site as I had started it. Of course using free templates to make my sites look better is why I am using Blogger.com.

So, this site is full of templates that generous people have shared with the public, you can download and use these templates on your websites, legally. The site claims to currently have over 2000 free designs. Terri told me that you do have to sift through them to find the best ones.

I am going to starting using them more. I use Dreamweaver for my websites and it comes with very few templates.

Monday, April 02, 2007

GooSync - Synchronize Google Calendar with your Mobile Device

I have been looking for an easy way to synchronize my calendar, which is now in Google Calendar, with my Pocket PC and I have found this one. GooSync.com is a free tool and service that makes this a snap. I switched over to using Google Calendar exclusively as my calendar due to how useful it is and better than the other calendar tools I have used. I use a Dell Axim PDA that I have always wanted to find a way to sync the two. Actually, I stopped using my PDA because it was not in sync but today it is. It only took 5 minutes to signup for the service and install the client.

I had abandoned using the Lotus Notes Calendar at work that I used to have M-Notes installed that synched my PDA with that calendar. Well with GooSync installed, now my Lotus Notes Calendar is synchronized with my Google Calendar.

Oh and GooSync works with a lot of mobile devices, including cell phones, palms and smart phones. Click here to look up your device.

Check it out at http://goosync.com