Ed Tech Review » PC Software

Jing Screen Capture Utility

MrYardley — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:34:00 +0000

Jing is a product that can capture either a still image of anything on your screen or a recording of up to 5 minutes of your screen. Wouldn’t it be handy to show the students how to do something, rather than just trying to explain the steps. Once you start using screen capture you wonder what you did without it. It is great for taking a picture of a website, Google earth images, or application instructions.

Jing is made by Techsmith who makes the best and most widely used professional screen capture applications. This free version is easier to use and has most of the features that you would need as a teacher. Jing is also Mac or Windows compatible.

The Best Word Processor for Teachers

MrYardley — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:41:07 +0000

Many years ago before the dawn of the internet age a company dominated the word processing market. Wordperfect was the standard in most businesses that used word processing. Then another powerhouse entered the market in 1995 and there was a significant shift in the business market to Microsoft Office. Quite honestly at that time Microsoft had a little better package available for business and Businesses converted in masses and never looked back. Should they? In the title wave of Microsoft dominance, Wordperfect now owned by Corel has been responding by pushing invasion to make a better product and reducing there price to make an office suite more affordable. Has all of this work been enough to catch up to Microsoft. Well in sales no, but when it comes to the quality and value of the product, I think they have.

I am reasonably adept at Microsoft Office, and personally love the enhancements in Office 2007. I have not used Wordperfect in 10 years, So I thought that I could not give a fair comparison to the products since Corel Wordperfect X3 is so new to me. I was wrong. Within 5 Minutes on Corel Wordperfect X3 I knew I was using a far superior tool than Microsoft Office 2007. I was doing advanced formating of a document with tables, photos, dynamic links, within 20 minutes without even referring to the help menu. I have used Corel Wordperfect X3 for about 4 days and can not ever see me going back to the miserable limitations of Microsoft word. Unfortunately my trial version runs out in about three weeks, and I’ll have to pay for my copy, but with the reasonable price point I have no problem with the change. There ya go Corel your market share just went up .00001% Another small step in the right direction.

Dapple is a great Geology Teaching Tool!

MrYardley — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:41:26 +0000

http://dapple.geosoft.com/default.asp

Dapple makes it easy to find and visualize massive quantities of geoscientific data available on the Internet.

View geoscience data, satellite imagery, remote sensing data, geology maps, geophysical data, and many other earth data sets of interest to geoscientists.
Save an earth view and share your view with colleagues.
Add new Geosoft DAP and WMS servers of interest.
View GeoTIFF files.

Dapple is a great resource and product. It is fun to use, and interesting. Is it a replacement to Google Earth? well no. Google Earth has many capabilities that make it a powerful tool itself. Dapple is a great addition to Google Earth however, and is great for those that really want to get in to geology.