14 Jan 2009
As anyone who’s been following the RebootIT Twitter feed today will know, I’ve been at the first day of the BETT Show 09. BETT (or British Education and Training Technology) is an education focussed technology event with the global industry giants of IT such as Microsoft right the way down to businesses run by individuals providing specialised learning materials. Whilst the Academy is not dealing directly with educating students, we do work in the HE sector and so the suppliers are often the same. Additionally we do need to train our own staff in technology and so there’s some parallels there too.
Read More12 Jan 2009
For a simple screen shot taking tool, Lightscreen is a free piece of software that sits in the system tray and can assign hot keys to capturing screen areas as well as the usual desktop and active window. It can also be set to dump out direct to file.
Read More12 Jan 2009
Every presentation these days involves Microsoft PowerPoint. After a while no matter how much multimedia you add to it, your presentation can still look a bit dull and boring. In order to make your next presentation a bit different why not try pptPlex?
Read More11 Jan 2009
NoteTab is a favoured text editor of mine and for a number of years I’ve used it for working with web pages and coding up HTML, PHP, Javascript and the like. One of the best features of NoteTab (beyond the light version being free to download) is its powerful scripting language - creating what is known as NoteTab Clips.
Read More09 Jan 2009
Microsoft Word has a little known feature (unless you happen to have read Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 212251 of course) that allows you to create large amounts of sample text using what’s in effect an inline macro command. Microsoft Word 2007 has a wider range of macro commands than previous versions, but I’ll describe the 2007 versions here.
Read More07 Jan 2009
When scheduling meetings with people who don’t share a common calendar system I favor the use of Doodle. However you might be interested to know that Meet-o-matic are offering 1,000 free registrations for their latest more advanced beta version for online registrations.
Read More07 Jan 2009
I did a bit more tweaking of the Yahoo Pipe construct that puts the FlagIT blog and Twitter feed together onto the Reboot IT blog. The output now combines the two feeds in a chronological order.
Read More06 Jan 2009
I was working on an Excel spreadsheet a couple of days ago where I wanted to automatically pick up the name of the current worksheet to use in a VLOOKUP function. I came up with the following combination of functions to get it for me…
Read More01 Jan 2009
When it comes to podcasting Apple is the king. The iPod and its variations lead the market and the software bundled with Mac OS X makes creating any sort of podcast a breeze. Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple Mac be it for financial reasons or for internal IT related issues. Creating podcasts from Windows is a little more laborious, but with the right tools it can be made much easier.
Read More29 Dec 2008
One of the biggest things in the Academy is communication. Just like any other organisation there’s a whole heap of discussion about the right ways to communicate and about who receives what information, and about what constitutes too little and information versus information overload. There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring the options we have available and trying things out from time to time.
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