Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is at home with family and friends enjoying a little relaxation these next few days.
This past week, I can place fair blame on my notebook computer for more than one late night and more than a handful of headaches. I’ll spare you the details. This experience has reminded me however, that we should all be doing some basic routine maintenance to our PC’s, which might help prevent a few headaches. A few things that you should be doing to your PC and also the PC’s in your classrooms on a regular basis include:
- BACK UP YOUR DATA to more than one physical location (regularly)!
- Remove/Uninstal unused/old programs
- Disk Cleanup
- Check for Disk Errors
- Defragment your Disk/s
- Limit Autostart Programs
More info along with instructions on how to perform these tasks can be found here among other places on the net: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/northrup_restoreperf.mspx
For those of you with Microsoft Zunes (direct competitor to the iPod from Apple), or those of you considering one or the other, perhaps as Christmas gifts, you may want to consider some recent changes. Previously, podcasting has been very difficult if not impossible to do with a Zune and Zune software. As many of you know, I strongly advocate for podcasting in the classroom and for professional development. The inability of the Zune to accommodate this, until recently, has turned me off of the Zune. However, recent changes to the Zune software have made podcasting an option similar to iTunes. New hardware versions for both the Zune and iPods have also been released recently.
Get more info here:
One last little side note: many of you have seen/experienced at least a quick demonstration of my new Senteo Student Response System (the “clickers”). Here’s a nice little article this week from Techlearning on using “Clickers” in the classroom. Check this out when you have about 5 extra minutes this Holiday weekend, it’s worth your time:
http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604803
Remember to look into using something like Bloglines to subscribe to this as well as all of your other blogs. It only takes you about 5 minutes to do, is free and will end up saving you lots of time. Contact me with questions!
Have a great holiday and get rested up for these next few week’s before Winter/Christmas Break in your classrooms!
