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Useful Extension that works with Libre Office or Open Office to upload documents to Google Docs. Nice to be able to use as a quick backup option for important documents, or can be an easy way to get a document up to Google Docs so it can be shared and edited in the future.

A fun way to learn about the MS Office Ribbon

Thanks Roman Johnson for the share!

A NY Times review of OnLive's cloud based virtualized Windows 7 PC with MS Office for which you pay a puny $5 a month and use from your iPad. Coming "soon" to smart phones, and, of most interest to churches and schools, to your local Mac or Windows PC. Faster than any physical desktop and using an ultra high speed internet connection, the OnLive PC will almost entirely eliminate the worst time and software costs of operating a Windows PC. Read David Pogue's NT Times review to learn about the benefits and draw backs of OnLive's implementation.

Looks very interesting Randy. Thanks for sharing. this looks very promising. Have you tried it? I just downloaded the iPad app and created an account so I'm going to give it a try.

Good info for any church/school office to review.

Has anyone ever used something like this in his classroom?  I have students that greatly enjoy having some music playing in the background (I limit it to classical piano, mostly).  Anyone know of a study that demonstrates if this helps students learn?

I've used Simply Noise in my classroom of 5th graders and I have had mixed results. Some kids really like it and some hate it. I tend to prefer the brown noise as opposed to white or pink noise. I think I might make less of a deal of it with my next class next year and just use it for a little longer period of time to get a better read on its effectiveness. I took my students to on a field trip to Environmental Systems Inc in Brookfield, WI and they use brown noise generators throughout their office/cubicle area to mask ambient noise. I found it very soothing. They used to have it timed to go off at 4pm and they found that their employees subconsciously sensed it was time to leave for the day. Not wanting to encourage them to leave early, they decided to gradually bring the volume of the noise down over the course of 30 minutes and that took care of their issue. Not necessarily applicable to what you were asking about, but kind of interesting.

With cloud storage continuing to make progress as broadband continues to make inroads to more people and speeds increase, I hope features and transparency in using them grows. I have and use to various degrees iCloud, SkyDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive (used Insync for a while). My favorite is still DropBox and the space limitations are not an issue for most people. Speeds of Cloud storage will never be the same as LAN or WLAN speeds for large file storage, so frequent access to large files in the cloud is not a realistic possibility yet (ever?). While an argument could be made for backup, well I think CrashPlan, Mozy or Carbonite (as well as others) have that market covered. While I like the Arstechnica brief pros and cons (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/cloud-storage-a-pricing-and-feature-guide-for-consumers.ars), I would love to see more in depth pros and cons from long term usage. iCloud for instance while great for iOS backup for our families 2 iPhones and 1 iPad, there is no transparent way to mount the iCloud volume for direct or cached data storage. On the other hand, the Shared folder on the Dropbox volume is nice for my wife and I to share working files across our two or three computers for work. Awesome. SkyDrive has a hook in MS Office which I have tested and works nicely, but it is limited in device support. GoogleDrive is really new, so I am still working through using it. I suspect this will continue to evolve over time.

The Office parady is hillarious!