Tips from your TIS

Welcome back everyone, I hope you had a fabulous break. I have three things for you today, a keyboard shortcut, a website and a Firefox add-on.

When you are working on a PC there are many times that you might have a number of windows open. With all those windows open sometimes taking your hands off your keys, finding the mouse, and then finding the window takes time. One way to switch between windows is to use the “Alt” key and then hit “Tab” to cycle through the open windows. Each time you hit tab, it will switch to the next open window.

Now for the website, if you have ever wanted to take a video off of YouTube or wanted to convert a file from one format to another, here’s a free online option for you. Let me introduce you to Zamzar. With Zamzar you can convert images, video, audio and regular document files. It’s not instantaneous, and you’ll have to wait until you receive an email to go back and download it, but I’ve had great success with the files that I have converted. Just to be clear, there are many things/sites that it won’t convert so be patient and do some experimenting.

The final item for this post is for Firefox users. Mozilla Firefox is an alternative browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While there are some sites that you must use Explorer (including some of the district applications), if you’re interested in using Firefox you can ask your CRS to install it for you. Visit the website for more information. However, Firefox is not the tip here; once you have it installed there is an add-on called Auto-Copy. This copies any text that you highlight in your browser to the clipboard ready to be pasted. This can be used for URL’s, or other text that you want to copy alleviating the keyboard shortcut or Edit –> Copy mouse commands when surfing the web.

Again, welcome back and have a great second semester.

This post is more geared towards parents of young children and possibly elementary school teachers who are looking to control what content kids can access on the Internet. What’s different about this as opposed to other filtering systems is that parents and teachers pick the content themselves rather than relying on a third party.

Glubble is a free tool for the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser. It permits each member of the family to have their own custom environment, so that when kids use it they only see the very best parts of the Internet based on selections made by their parents or supplied by trusted family brands.

Glubble enhances Firefox to make sure kids can’t see the whole World Wild Web instead they can only see family friendly parts of the web, its like their own little world on the web. The company calls it their Glubble World.

On the site you’ll find a tour that will show you how it works. One thing to remember, this doesn’t work with Internet Explorer. For those of you still running Internet Explorer, maybe it’s time to try Firefox.

Links:
http://www.glubble.com
http://www.getfirefox.com