CloudOn is a free iPad app for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can easily create and edit documents on your iPad.
CloudOn uses Dropbox for all document management tasks. Therefore, prior to installing CloudOn, create a Dropbox account and install the Dropbox iPad app. Watch the following video for an overview of the app.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FQYI30QaQ&feature=youtu.be&a
What it is: An online tool to store all your files such as documents, images, and videos, and access them from a central location.
What it does: After creating your own Dropbox account, this free service allows you to have access to your files at your fingertips and exchange files with other Dropbox users. It is web-based and independent of the computer you are using.
A quick download of the Dropbox application to your computer permits all documents to be uploaded and available in the Dropbox website. Files can be exchanged easily across Macs and PCs.
Note: Internal, confidential, and proprietary data should not be shared with third-party services. See Data Classification Schema in K-State’s Data Classification and Security Policy. Also, the K-State Zimbra Briefcase allows for file storage.
Continue reading “Free tool: Dropbox (online storage space)”
As the spring 2011 semester winds down, deadlines are looming for papers, projects, etc. While we always hope that technology is available, there are many examples of lost papers in the final seconds — just before turning it in. This happens for many reasons (but never at an opportune time) including a failed computer, failed hard drive, power surge, network outage, and a host of other reasons.
Hi all, my name is Travis Heideman and I’m the Apple campus student rep for Kansas State. I will be hosting a Digital Portfolio Workshop for students and faculty 6-7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, in Room 213 in the K-State Student Union. Free food and beverages will be provided!
A digital portfolio is an online website that would most likely have your resume, school work/prior work (papers, projects, videos, photos), an “about you” section, and anything else you would like to add. For example, here’s the link to my digital portfolio.
Continue reading “Digital Portfolio Workshop April 21 with Macs”
The iSIS enhancements to add a textbook icon to students’ enrollment shopping carts and course schedules occurred in mid-March, just in time for fall enrollment. Students with multiple courses in their enrollment shopping cart or on their class schedule can now see all of the textbooks associated with their courses in a single view on the Varney’s website shopping cart, by clicking on the textbook icon.
Clicking that icon will display a list of all the required textbooks for the listed classes. For full instructions, see Viewing your textbooks in iSIS Help.
(SoftChalk LessonBuilder 6 is a commercial authoring tool that helps create learning modules and digital learning objects.)
A new feature in SoftChalk LessonBuilder 6 involves the ability to create tabbed information. Tabbed information is a way of making related information available in a tabbed structure. The information may be related in various ways — sequentially (chronologies or phases), categorically (types), or in other ways. The tabbing is a way to structure information.
Below is a screen capture of a finished “tabbed information” structure created using SoftChalk LessonBuilder 6.
Continue reading “Building tabbed information in SoftChalk LessonBuilder 6”
(Editor’s note: CCleaner was included in a “Free Security Tools” presentation by Josh McCune at K-State’s Oct. 12 security training event. The entire PowerPoint presentation is available for viewing.)
To optimize Windows PCs to have more hard disk space, Piriform’s free CCleaner tool will go through and find many files left over from browser searches, downloads, and even excess registry files — and will delete them.
Harvard Townsend, K-State’s chief information security officer, noted some security benefits from CCleaner.
“From a security perspective, I think the greatest value of CCleaner is the secure deletion, which is OFF by default, and the ability to securely erase unused disk space (a feature recently added),” Townsend said. “Wiping out the browser history and cache files also provides security value, but people should also be aware that wiping out cookies removes some useful information, too.”
For more information about CCleaner and how it works:
The university transitioned from Oracle Calendar to K-State Zimbra Calendar over the summer. Oracle Calendar is still available as an archive, but will be decommissioned in early 2011.
Easy-to-follow instructions are available for you to export your Oracle Calendar data and then import it into K-State Zimbra. This will allow you to have a copy of past events from your Oracle Calendar accessible in your K-State Zimbra Calendar. Other Oracle Calendar archiving options are available if you’d rather not import your past events into K-State Zimbra.
Continue reading “Faculty/staff: Archive your Oracle Calendar events”
Wikis are simple software packages that allow people to co-edit information and to make that information sharable, either within a password-protected space or a wholly public one. A “wiki” means “fast” in Hawaiian and was used by Ward Cunningham for this type of software. Cunningham was the originator of a wiki back in 1995 (see Wikipedia’s WikiWikiWeb entry).
The power of wikis
The power of a wiki resides in being able to evolve a knowledge structure that changes based on the available information. The interlinked pages, the search functions, and the “random page” generator enables people to find what they need but also to interact with the contents in serendipitous ways.
Wikis are also unusual in that they allow virtually anyone to edit the contents (although the access may be limited to those who have to pass through an authentication layer if password protection is required). Many wikis contain the broad range of mainstream multimedia: text, imagery, links to videos and audio files, and simulations.
MediaWiki
A well-known open-source software is MediaWiki, most well-known for being the underlying wiki structure for Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), which is available in a number of languages.
Continue reading “Spotlight: Open-source MediaWiki for shared knowledge creation”
StumbleUpon, a free plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser, enables users to search the Web in a fresh way. This system filters resources on the Web to meet the personalized interests of particular users.
This tool is a recommender system that combines a self-defined user profile of preferences, the recommendations of friends in a user’s social network (as expressed through Facebook connections), and similar users’ preferences.
StumbleUpon then combines high-end search capabilities, social networking, swarm intelligence and crowd sourcing, and popularity ratings — to filter websites to enhance targeted discovery (vs. more serendipitous Web search engine approaches).
Continue reading “Spotlight: “StumbleUpon” tool provides an individualized Web”
