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Have you ever had a colleague or student send you a file you have no idea how to open? If unfamiliar file extensions like “ODT,” “RGH” or “$S“ make you want to shout “!@#$%” you should visit OpenWith.org, a site that helps you find the program that will open whatever file you have — most of the time with free software. Spreadsheets, images, plugins, OpenWith can find all sorts of file types. Simply search for your mystery extension and OpenWith will find a program that can read it. You can also download a handy desktop tool to make looking up extensions even easier.  It’s an EXE file, in case you were wondering. That’s one file type you shouldn’t have to look up. -BILL FERRIS

OpenWith.org

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My first electronic portfolio was done six years ago using Mozilla Composer and burned to a CD, and my student teaching advisor was thrilled to not have to wade through another four-inch-thick binder filled with plastic sleeves and teacher-themed paper.  Back then, the CD was my compromise for privacy, as setting up a password-protected website was a lot more complex than it is now. These days, I’m helping student teachers create their own electronic portfolios, and Google Sites is the go-to tool for us.

Security and privacy is still a concern, and always will be, thanks to FERPA. Google makes it easy to make your site private, to share it with select individuals, or to make it entirely public and open to the world. Changing the sharing settings is a click away. If you’re submitting resumes, include a link and a note explaining how the hiring committee can access your portfolio, and in an interview, be prepared to share it.

Since Sites is a Google product, it works seamlessly with Google Docs (to save space, if you’re approaching the 100mb limit, storing files like your teaching philosophy in Docs and embedding them won’t count against your server space), YouTube (Google Video is sunsetting this year, sadly), Google Calendar,  Picasa web albums…you get the picture.

One of the reasons we’ve gone with Google Sites is that the portfolio is never married to the university’s servers, and long after our students have graduated, they can keep updating and accessing their portfolio without worrying their alma mater will someday push them out to make way for new student portfolios. It’s ad-free, unlike many other free websites, and very simple to edit and maintain. If you want your own domain name, you can purchase it and have it redirect to your Google Sites page.

It’s not perfect, though. For instance, you can’t download the source files easily, although I’ve heard rumors it’ll eventually be possible. I prefer Vimeo for video hosting, and the only embeddable content would have to be stored on YouTube, and be publicly available. There are several pre-designed themes (including one for teachers, if you’re into that!), and you can change the colors for just about any part of your site, but you can’t install custom themes. The limitations make it fairly foolproof, both for creators and for readers. If you are really committed to other services that don’t mesh with Google Sites, consider the Site a portal to your entire online presence.

To get started, get yourself a Google account if you don’t yet have one (and if you do have one, make sure it’s under a username you’d feel confident sharing professionally). Helen Barrett has a great tutorial (built within Google Sites) to guide you in creating your portfolio. You’ll have to sign in to each Google feature the first time you use it (Docs, Sites, etc) but your Google account name will be the same throughout. And since Google also allows you to have multiple sites, once your portfolio lands you a job, set up a new site for your classroom, and keep on learning. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Google Sites

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I came across this post on TechRadar.com a couple of months back. After thoroughly pillaging this list for ideas to write about for Instructify, I decided to just share with you this list of 50 sites. Plagiarism police, calm yourselves — some of the things on this list had already been on Instructify first. This list is divided up into sites concerned with software and tools, storage and files, graphics, research and e-learning, and mobile workers. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll come across something good. Now instead of writing about each one, I can focus on writing my script for CSI: Portland.

PROTIP #1: The comments section on a blog post can sometimes generate even more useful content.

Occasionally the comments section can offer up some more user-generated links and tips. After going through, I found about 14-15 extra links in the comments section. Which is a good thing, because, as one reader points out, five of the items in the main article have gone missing.

On the other hand, some of them are from companies doing some quasi-trolling to gain their website some exposure. Really, TickleMePlant.com? Really? Maybe you’ll still be able to live without some of the comment section’s additional sites, but would you really describe such a poor quality of life as LIVING? If you aren’t tickling plants everyday you’re just as well off being dead.

PROTIP #2: Try not to preface sentences by announcing:  PROTIP!  I’ve chased away a lot of my own credibility and a great deal of respect from other people thanks to that.

Sometimes you might find a couple of potentially good prospects in the comments. I came up with two more valid leads that I’ll need to check out. Sadly, though, like all things on the internet, the conversation in the comments section pretty much devolves into free MP3 websites. It was good while it lasted, I guess.-NICK YINGLING

50 Websites You’ll Wonder How you Lived Without

Photo credit: Steffe on Flickr.

Too often, developers think that just changing the fonts on a tool to Comic Sans will make it educator-friendly, when, really, there are a lot of big things to think about when designing for K-12 education. Because the developers of Edmodo are IT folks who’ve been working in public K-12 schools, they clearly understand that font choice is not the priority when it comes to making a usable, useful tool for kids and teachers. Ease of use and excellent privacy controls set Edmodo apart from the pack when it comes to free, online learning management tools. Edmodo has been called “Twitter for schools,” and while microblogging is part of the feature set, there is a whole lot more to Edmodo than 140 character text messages.

Edmodo allows you to post (and grade!) assignments, files, images, videos, and links, as well as post messages to your class, or to certain students in your class. You can have multiple groups (perhaps you teach several sections of students, or maybe you just want to use it for a single classroom’s group projects) that students access by being provided a code — not a complicated email-required signup process. Everything you do on Edmodo defaults to private, with an option to make anything public. The public page has an RSS feed, and would be a great way to broadcast important upcoming events (Field trip! Final exams!) in another way. Users can even set up Edmodo to send updates to their cell phones.

As you’d expect from a site created by two guys who really care about both technology and education, support is fantastic. They are available for demos or troubleshooting (when you create an account, you are automatically added to the Edmodo and support groups) and it’s not a corporation with canned responses, but folks who have a personal interest in making sure the service works the way it should. For more information, you can read an interview with the founders at Open Education, and an interview with a teacher using it in a North Dakota classroom. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Edmodo

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Seems like everybody’s built a platform for you to store and share files online. Given that everyone I know has suffered a hard drive crash at some point in their lives, it just feels safer letting Adobe or the almighty Google take care of important documents and files. Microsoft has joined the fray, too. No, they don’t have a free version of Word online, but they will keep your critical MS Office files safe and sound on their servers at Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

Once you’ve uploaded a file, you can edit it immediately if you’ve installed the latest Office Live Update. When you save changes to the file you’re working on, those are saved to the Office Live server as well, so you don’t have to worry about uploading the latest version. Of course, no cloud computing app would be complete without the ability to share your files with collaborators. This is a good option for students working on class projects, or if you and your colleagues would like to update worksheets within your department at school.

Writing for Instructify, I can always count on Microsoft as an easy target for ridicule. All snark aside, this is a nice feature that, if you’re an MS Office user, you should take advantage of.  Your important files won’t be vulnerable to a dropped laptop or busted hard drive, and you’ve got a lot less of a chance for the patented Microsoft blue screen (sorry, couldn’t help it). -BILL FERRIS

Microsoft Office Live Workspace

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Good evening. Right now, I’m writing to you from my apartment at an undisclosed location in Carrboro, North Carolina. I won’t tell you where I am exactly, but how would you imagine the place? Do you picture half-empties strewn about, a Scarface poster, Twizzlers, a bowl of cereal left in the bathtub, an untouched copy of Ulysses, a fridge stocked with any possible drink that women may want? (You’ll need to search YouTube for that last one on your own.) That is so far off the mark, I’m a bit insulted. I don’t own a Scarface poster.

The reason I’m writing from home is that I’m testing out the free Virtual Private Network app, LogMeIn Hamachi. Designed to allow users to instantly access remote network resources, Hamachi takes only a short amount of time to set up and guarantees that you’ll have to perform ZERO configuration to get it to work. I set up Hamachi on my laptop at work, and then I raced home to set it up on my home computer.

All in all, Hamachi delivers a decent, reliable VPN experience. I only experienced one frustrating thing while I was getting acquainted with it. You are asked to log in to their “test” network as part of their product tutorial, but I must’ve been trying at the internet’s rush hour because it was at max capacity. It took me a long time, re-trying periodically, but I eventually logged in. But until I was able to do so I couldn’t advance any further through the tutorial, and that was annoying because I’m not the VPN master, and I actually wanted to finish the tutorial.

How will it be useful to you? Do you have a computer in your classroom and at home? And a laptop? Connect all of them. The days of files being trapped in just one computer are swiftly coming to an end. Hmm… “The Days of Files Being Trapped in One Computer Are Over.” That’s a good tag line. I think I’ll send that over to the team doing the marketing for Tron 2. -NICK YINGLING

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Back up your files already. Seriously, right now. In the information age, a hard drive crash can affect your life as much as a house fire (except for, you know, the possibility of being burned alive. All right, it’s really not that much like a house fire — a car theft, perhaps…). Think about it — your music collection, vacation photos, your screenplay that you’ve been meaning to finish someday — all of it is vulnerable to the whims of a fragile construct of plastic and metal.

In the dark ages of 2003, I once spent an entire afternoon backing up my work computer with Zip disks. Nowadays, Box.net lets you back up 1GB of whatever you like online, for free.  Creating an account and uploading your files takes less time than it took to write this article. And with that much storage space, you don’t exactly have to be choosy about what you upload. I just hit “select all” in my writing folder and hit “Enter.” A few hundred files are now backed up, just in case my hard drive decides to go into early retirement. A gigabyte won’t get you as far with music files, of course, but you can upgrade to more storage space for a small fee.

If there’s anyone in your life who needs this more than you do, it’s your students. With Box.net, they can eliminate all headaches due to  hard drive crashes, literal computer crashes (as in, falling off a tabletop), and whatever other maladies may affect their systems. Box.net allows users to share files, so it’s good for collaborative projects, too.

Data backup is the electronic version of the bomb shelter. Box.net will help ensure you’re ready for a hard drive meltdown. -BILL FERRIS

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Ever need to send a video, or audio file that’s more than 20MB (the size limit on a Gmail attachment)? Drop.io is the answer. It’s really fast and easy. All you do is create a “drop” with a unique URL, add file(s), then decide if you how long you want it available (up to 1 year from last view), whether you want a password, and whether visitors can add, or delete files from the drop (great for projects). You can even share the drop through Twitter. Just click on “Drop It” and voila. Once you have files in your drop, you can notify folks by email so they can retrieve files.

What if you have files larger than 100MB (the limits of a drop on drop.io)? Here are some alternatives from Lifehack Magazine some taking files up to 500MB. You’ll never need to burn a CD again. -ALICE MERCER

drop.io

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For centuries, structures made from adobe were inexpensive, durable constructions that could shelter a family and its possessions from the elements. Today, Adobe Share houses valuable data online, easily and inexpensively (that is to say, for free).

With Adobe Share, you can store up to a gigabyte of data on the web. Just select a file from your computer and upload it, and your important documents, pictures and music are secure. If your students want to collaborate on a document, they can also share files with others (hence the name Adobe Share).

Adobe Share is part of the larger suite, Acrobat.com, which includes several other cool apps like an online word processor (take that, Google). And unlike the Adobe Acrobat Reader software of its namesake, Acrobat.com won’t bug you about updating to the latest version every ten minutes. Like a lot of Adobe products, the interface is pretty slick, with a charcoal gray background, and menus that fade in and out when they’re needed. Pretty nice looking for a company named after mud bricks. -BILL FERRIS

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Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

When I got my first computer before going to college, it amazed me with its massive 366MB of memory. How would I ever use all of it? That computer cost nearly $2000.

Since then, hard drives have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. Want proof? OpenDrive Beta will give you a gigabyte of storage for free.

OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.

Years from now we’ll laugh at the idea of a paltry gigabyte of storage. Until then, feel free to marvel at OpenDrive’s massive amount of memory. And you can’t beat the price. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Dizzy with the possibility of all that free storage, I forgot to put a link in the article. You can try out OpenDrive by clicking here.

OpenDrive Beta

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I didn’t have a working printer when I was in school, and even if I had a working printer I would have probably never had paper or ink. I was unprepared, but I wasn’t entirely helpless. Keep in mind this was at a time when flash drives were luxury items and way before Google Docs. I had this method for handing in essays: type the paper, attach the Word doc in an email from one account to a separate email account, and finally print it out at the computer lab. Most of the time it worked…except when I would forget to attach the file and not realize it until after the 30 minute bus ride to campus.

Somebody at GradeMate must’ve heard me cursing my own foolishness, because storing files for your classes is one of their features (I don’t have an exact number on how much you can store, perhaps you might discover this during your own investigation and post a comment). Other useful features include managing your classes and setting up reminders, but the most useful by far is keeping track of your grades. That revelation shouldn’t make your mind explode - the site is called GradeMate, after all. You can add multiple assignments, exams, and projects, then set weight amounts and enter scores.

Take a moment to think about your students. Think about that student who obsesses over grades. What about the kid who can’t remember a due date to save her life? Or how about that student who was going to email himself his essay and print it out in the computer lab, but forgot to attach it to his email?
–NICK YINGLING

GradeMate

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In high school, I swore off backpacks. Therefore, my goal was to carry as few things as humanly possible. So I would get one of those huge 5-subject notebooks which worked great for that purpose; that is, until the end of the semester approached, and it would be practically exploding with a disorganized mess of notes and papers. What I would have given for a laptop and Springnote.

In essence, Springnote is a wiki, but really it’s like a virtual three-ring binder that you can share online. It works similarly to Google Docs, but it’s hyper-organized and super easy to use. All of your documents are organized into a drop-down tree menu with categories and tags, so you can see and access all of your content quickly. And with two gigs of space and the ability to add attachments and embedded links and images, what more could you ask for?

Well, the text editor is simple and intuitive, you can set your documents as private or public, and you can invite collaborators to edit documents, too. Springnote is a great tool for sharing class notes with your students, having your students work on group projects together, or even for collaborating with colleagues on event planning with to-do lists and details and everything you need all in one shareable place.

It’s probably too early to rid the world of backpacks entirely, but it’s a start. - LAUREN FROHNE

Springnote

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Oooooosaaaahhhhh! I just keep saying this site’s name over and over again. Ooooosaaahhhhhh!Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, Oosah is a neat Web-based application that lets you upload photos, music and videos — or use the media you already have uploaded to your Flickr, Facebook and YouTube accounts — to make multimedia slideshows, which they call “oosahs.”

But Oosah is more than just a place to make slideshows, it’s also an entire Web-based file management system. And, you have 2 gigs of space to play with for free! You can upload your photos directly to the site and easily manage them, or use it to safely store your videos and music files — whatever you want!

Oosah is emphatically not a file sharing site, like Mediafire or YouSendIt, though; it’s a user-generated content hosting, management, and sharing site. The content you or your students put on Oosah is only available for others to see if you make it public. And even the content you make public can only be viewed by others on Oosah, not downloaded or accessed in any other way. It’s open to anyone who is at least 13 years old and it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, so it’s the perfect place for your students to manage their media and get creative with slideshows and multimedia.

Keep in mind, though, that Oosah is still in beta, so expect some kinks here and there. I had a little trouble using photos from my Flickr and Facebook accounts to make a slideshow, but uploading files directly to the site worked super smoothly.

Oooooosaaaahhhhh! That was the last one, I promise. -LAUREN FROHNE

Oosah

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I’m always sharing some kind of large file with friends and co-workers—photos, PowerPoint presentations, or zip files with years worth of documents. Sometimes, these just get too big for e-mail, so I’m stuck using a file-sharing service on the Web. Sure, there are tons of sites for sharing large files, but most of them use infuriating tactics to entice me to buy a premium membership.

After months of using services that forced my friends to wait for downloads to begin, I found drop.io, a free service that allows me to upload files quickly and allows my friends to download them quickly as well. Drop.io doesn’t ask users to sign up, log in, or divulge any information beyond how long shared files should stay on the server—drop.io will store them for up to a year. Once you’ve created a “drop,” you can add files to it by e-mail, web, phone, or fax. Drops stay private until you publicize them, too, as opposed to other file-sharing sites that are indexed in Google.

Drop.io limits files to a sizeable 100MB and has several options for displaying and storing different kinds of files. The interface is elegant and ad-free, which means that I no longer suffer the embarrassment of sharing files with colleagues, only to have them see inappropriate or ridiculous banner ads. –ROSS WHITE

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