Fife Schools Technology

Something to think about when composing emails…

Some folks like to express their creativity when sending emails by choosing “non-standard” fonts.

Below is a screen shot of some fonts I’ve seen used in emails. They all started out as size 12 font but the blog template is shrinking the image horizontally so click on the examples to see the image normal size.

(the last one is my default font)

While some fonts are still pretty easy to read, some are more difficult. If you had to read something long and complicated, it could be down-right frustrating.

While creativity is great, we don’t want to sacrifice readability. The reader of your emails is less likely to spend the time reading your message if it is difficult to read. The difficulty can be increased when a “busy” background is also used.

Some people may think that their email will stand out and be more likely to be read if it looks different (i.e. different font) but with so many things competing for our attention, emails that are harder to read are actually less likely to be read fully.

So thank goodness for creativity. The world is a much more interesting place because of it. Just be aware of how it affects the readability of your messages.

Here is a blog post that did a good job summarizing RSS and why it is a nice technology.

RSS Appreciation Revisited

I use RSS all the time and would encourage others to become familiar with it.

NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) is one of the largest (if not the largest) conferences on education and technology in the country. This year it is being held in Washington, DC. Since it isn’t in the budget to attend a conference across the country, there are a number of ways to still benefit from the information being shared.

One way is by accessing the handouts being created for the various presentations. You can search for handouts and download them by visiting http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/program/presenter_handouts.php .

I think of RSS as robotic web-surfing.

I have a number of websites that I’m interested in, all of which periodically add new content. The problem is that I don’t have time to visit each of those sites one by one on a frequent basis to see if something new has been added to those sites. It’s too much to keep track of and would take too long. I’m bound to miss something.

Instead, I use software (a RSS reader) that automatically goes to those sites and checks to see if anything new has been added. Then I just need to skim the list that summarizes the new content found on all of these sites and if interested, visit a site directly to consume the full content.

I have over 120 sites that I keep track of via RSS. Once a day or so, I review the list of new content and read further when interested. I can skim 120 sites in about 10 minutes. It would take hours to visit all of those sites directly.

What do I subscribe to?
· Work-related news: technical and educational sites and blogs
· People I know: friends and family who have blogs or other content sites such as photo album sites
· Fun stuff: a number of sites that I just think are interesting or hobby-related

Now for the Technical Stuff:

In order to do RSS, the website producing the content must have a RSS feed set up which is a specially configured web page. It’s not intended to be read directly by people so those details really aren’t important to the consumer other than if the site doesn’t produce RSS, it won’t work.

On the consumer side, you need an RSS reader. There are many software options. Outlook 2007 can subscribe to RSS feeds. Most new browsers (including Internet Explorer) have RSS readers built in. There are stand-alone RSS readers but I am currently using a web-based tool (Google Reader) so that I can check from my computer and from my mobile phone.

In the RSS reader, you need to add a “subscription” so the RSS reader knows where to get the RSS feed.

The trickiest part of the whole thing is probably figuring out the web address of the RSS feed and adding that address to your RSS reader. Often, sites will have an RSS link. Just copy the URL of that link and paste it into your reader.

Hope that helps. I’d be glad to answer questions.

The past week’s weather gave us many opportunities to use our automated call system. This also gave us the opportunity to answer some questions about the system.

Read the FAQs here: http://www.fifeschools.com/depts/tech/help/CallSystemFAQs.html

One of the no-so-fun computer tasks is cleaning up old files. They take up hard drive space and make it harder to find the stuff you really need. While it is possible to increase storage space (and we do so as needed), it is hard to justify purchasing more hard drive space unless we’re making good use of the space we have.

It can take a lot of time to look for old files but here is a hint to make that a more efficient process. Search for the largest files first and delete or archive those files no longer needed. Here’s how I do it:

1. Open your My Documents folder (this will work with any folder).
2. Click on the Search button on the Task Bar.
3. Click on All files and folders on the right margin.
4. Leave the name field blank.
5. Click on What size is it? and options will appear.
6. Click the Large (more than 1 MB) option.
7. Click the Search button.
8. After the search is finished, sort the list by size by clicking on the Size label at the top of the list to show the largest files at the top.
9. Decide if you need those large files and delete or archive somewhere else.

Hope that helps.

We’re asked about ZIP files from time to time… specifically how to open them. There is special software to manage ZIP files (and other compressed files) but do you need something special? Nope.

Windows has built-in ability to create and open ZIP files.

To create a ZIP, right-click on the file(s) or folder you want to convert to a ZIP and choose “Send To” > “Compressed (zipped) Folder”. This will create a new folder that has a little zipper on the folder icon.

To open a ZIP, right-click on the zipped folder and choose “Extract All…” . That will take you through a wizard, allowing you to choose where to save the extracted folder.

Not sure what a ZIP file is? Check out my next post. I give a brief explanation.