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Recap of this week's keynote at the FETC Conference in Orlando by Jaime Casap, Global Education Evangelist at Google. He told attendees about the ways technology has -- and will continue to -- change K-12 education. Among other things, Casap said technology is causing students to learn in new ways and is providing them with almost constant access to information. The changing landscape, Casap said, makes it even more important for teachers to have access to professional development and for there to be a focus on digital leadership in schools.

Create a browser home page with easy large button for functions like email, search, weather, news, etc.  Set up custom buttons as well.  Set one up for yourself or someone else.  Cloud access.  Perhaps useful for school computers.

A desktop wiki like tool for keeping track of notes, phone numbers, and even has built in tools to use as your GTD system. It is cross platform running on Linux and Windows. With Dropbox you can keep your notes synced between all of your computers. You can even attach documents, files, and insert pictures too to keep all of your information in one place. Each note page is saved in plain text making it possible to edit the files with a normal text editor if you do not have Zim Wiki installed on a computer but have access to the files.

An online course on mobile ministry opportunities.  Freely accessible links to helpful course resources including PowerPoints (Week 1).

Wondered how to have my LastPass extension log off automatically after a certain duration of time, etc. Otherwise, if someone stole my laptop, I'd still be logged in to LP and they'd have access to all my passwords. Good, simple options in LP Preferences...

Microsoft OS centric, but good tips for any device

Great tip. Macs have this feature too in some Apple apps (Mail, Pages 5, etc.) under Edit > Start Speaking. There also a chrome extension called "read & write" for this on the web. Article makes a good point that this is better for "lighter" fare. :) Also, hadn't heard of this blog until now, and will now be following it.

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.

Use this tool to allow people to book times on your Google Calendar.

Great tool - maybe a way to schedule conferences? I'll try it this fall and let you know how it goes!

Take a look at PicKATime for conference scheduling. Ours is up right now so you could look at it on our site - emanuelnl.org/school Works great and parents love it; not free through. $50 a conference. We think it is worth it. The secretary sets it all up and teachers have access and see their own scheduled conference times. I find youcanbook me works well for teachers setting up individual conference tmes with me for purposes of their tech growth planning throughout the year.

Sync cloud based files from Google Docs, Drop Box, SugarSync, Picassa and FTP

Vimeo has announced a partnership with Amara for captioning videos. You can create your own for free or you can purchase professional captioning for a fee.

Brother printers are an excellent choice for large and high-quality printing needs. It is easy to set up and access. However, Brother printer users occasionally face common to complex problems. Here in this article, we'll see how to fix one such Brother printer problem. Continue reading to learn more.