10. The first thing you think about when you get in a car is returning all those phone calls you haven’t had time to return.

9. You never watch a TV show at its scheduled time (go Tivo!)

8. While in the customer service waiting line, you call the customer service number on your cell phone and get faster service.

7. You use the alarm on your cell phone to wake up in the morning.

6. You regularly email yourself (and maybe even respond!).

5. When you say or do something you didn’t mean, you think “Undo.”

4. You use Google to research answers to all you unknown questions.

3. You don’t forward the “please forward this to 10 of your friends” messages to your friends (unless they really are profound).

2. You are regularly disappointed that you can’t surf while driving.

And…the number 1 sign of a modern techno-geek…

1. You send yourself a voice mail message then, when listening to your voice mail, you don’t recognize the caller!

Einstein Rocks Out,
originally uploaded by midiman.

Melanie posted earlier about her favorite photo online storage and organizing sites. The CTL also has in the past offered workshops on how to obtain content for use with instructional projects that is legal and honors copyright law.

I’d like to quickly add a few to the list that I’ve found helpful over the past year or so.

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Google wants to know from college students how they are using email to be more productive in their lives on campus. Students can take the Google Survey online: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/landing_pages/apps_edu.html

Pass the word along to your students….the survey is definitely slanted to give useful into to Google about their Gmail service. But, some other useful info could come of it as well. MCC is going to be switching students over to Gmail very soon, so it might be helpful to expose them to the survey.

Office 2007 for Microsoft Windows has been recently released and many new computers are coming with Office 2007 installed. As a result, many students may be using the newer version of MS Office. TSS is not currently deploying Office 2007 to faculty and staff computers. However, some instructors are running into problems with students submitting work in the newer Office 2007 format.

Here are some suggestions on how to work with Office 2007 documents. If you have any questions, contact TSS for assistance.

My last post was serious so here’s another quick funny post to contrast it. On the way back from the Red Mountain campus yesterday I was having another good conversation with my ride, Charlie Levine. Right in the middle of it my right leg started feeling really hot for some reason. I felt bad because Charlie and I were having a good talk and during his part of the conversation I was fidgeting around in my seat and thinking to myself, “Why in the world is my leg on fire?!”. It took me about 3 minutes of discomfort to finally do something about it, and I discovered that a 9-volt battery that I had put in my pocket in preparation for some video work that morning was being shorted out by my key chain. (Which by the way creates a very hot set of keys.)

So here are my 9-volt battery safety tips:

• Don’t touch them to your tongue unless you want a shocking experience (it’s okay to do this once when you are a kid and your older sibling triple-dog dares you)
• Don’t touch them to your metal watch band while it’s on your wrist (I did this once on purpose just to see what would happen)
• Don’t carry them in your pocket with anything metal. (It gives new meaning to the term Hot Pocket) Ouch!

After car-pooling with her to the MCC Red Mountain campus yesterday, Donna and I had a conversation that she encouraged me to write about in a blog post. So this one’s for you, Donna.
I’m currently enrolled in an educational psychology graduate class at ASU entitled “Fundamental Theories of Learning.” Tying it together with some of the technology skills and the environment I work in has been an excellent experience. In the class one of the papers we read was entitled “The Seven Sins of Memory” — based on the book of the same name written by Dr. Daniel L. Schacter from Harvard University.

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Responses (from 14 MCC faculty) to a request for top three favorite podcasts (most are available inside iTunes)…if you did not get a chance to submit your favorites, you can add them in the comments area below:

Technology Related

• BuzzOutLoud (http://www.bol.cnet.com/)
• SlashdotReview (http://slashdotreview.com/)
• Twit - (http://www.twit.tv/TWiT) - This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte and guests
• TEDtalks - (http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/)

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If you are using a PC computer you may see the Thumbs.db file littered all over your hard drive or flash drive. If you are using a Macintosh computer you may see .DS_Store files everywhere. What are these files and can you get rid of them? I stumbled across an article about these files today and always wondered about them. They are one of those minor irritations that I never invest time in learning about. So allow me to share… (more…)

Article Link

Hmmm…interesting. This research seems to lend support for the idea NOT to use PowerPoint as a way to place bulleted text on the board but rather images and diagrams and animations that illustrate the idea. So, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of PowerPoint. Let’s use it in ways that stimulate the brains of our students not ways that overload their brains and make learning more difficult.

Every class has an official end date that is programmed into the Student Information System (SIS). The live courses you have created in WebCT are automatically deleted two weeks after the official SIS end date. You will receive messages from TSS alerting you to the impending deletion of your course and the date. During the two week window between the end of the course and the deletion of your course, there are some procedures you should follow:

a) Create a development course from your live course - this will save your content for use in future semesters
b) Download and save student data (gradebook, mail, discussions, assignments) to your local computer- doing so will enable you to access student data quickly
c) Archive your course - preserves all content and student data in the event of a grade dispute, however, format is not easily accessible and requires intervention of a WebCT administrator

Steps for all of these procedures are located on the CTL web page at: http://ctl.mc.maricopa.edu/_resources/webct/end_course_procedures.html