A Week of Useful Links
Weblogged points to this site which mobilizes Google Earth to track places in relation to literary works. Want to show your students the places in the Odyssey? Use this. (They have more than just the Odyssey, but I always had trouble keeping track of those place names so this seems like the most useful to me.)
Xplanazine a site that is “hit or miss.” Outlines a useful idea for collaborative online quizzes. Basically you make your quizzes available online to anyone who wants, and this helps students practice, and teachers see what other educators are doing. (Good idea, I generally don’t use quizzes though, but real useful for the disciplines that do.)
Via Lifehacker comes this free tool for converting to .pdf. This application (Windows only) makes it easy to convert on your desktop Word documents into .pdf. This is invaluable for sharing papers between people, as you know others will be able to read a .pdf and it will preserve formating.
March 14th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
There are actually other tools to convert PDF files for Windoze users. I have my students submit all papers to me as pdf files, and most of them use Windows. So, I maintain a list of free resources that allow them to save or convert their files in pdf format.
You can check this out on my web page:
http://sensei.ad.umuc.edu/cfiedler/otherinfo/savingpdffilesinwindows.html
Two of the options (PDF Creator, Cute PDF Writeer) are apps like doPDF, in that they work through the print dialog box. I appreciate your link, as I’ll add it as another option.
Unfortunately, many of my students are totally unable to install these apps on their PCs, or don’t understand how to use them. I stumbled upon another option to help those folks.
The third option isn’t an app, but a website called the Neevia Document Converter. You submit a word processing or other file and it will be converted free. Quite a few file formats are recognized. There are only two catches. First, it has to be less than 1MB in size. Second, it doesn’t yet work with .docX files.
In any case, feel free to link to my site. I’ll update it with the new link very soon.