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Best Backup Strategy: Combo

Your best bet is to combine a number of different methods into your backup strategy.

• Create a System Image: Use one of the many system restore tools to create a complete image of your PC, which will protect you in case of a catastrophic system failure. You’ll want to back this up to your external drive.
• Use a Backup Tool: Just pick one, any one, and start using it. Back up your data to an external drive, another PC, or anywhere else. Just make sure you don’t delete the data from the primary PC.
• Use an Online Backup for Important Files: Even though you are backing up to an external drive, you might want to start using something like Dropbox or Mozy to back up your most important files.

Just remember, all of your files need to be in at least Two places at once. You don’t want to get Journalspaced.

You’re Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way – Windows – Lifehacker.

Image via CrunchBase

What is Yammer?

Yammer is a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting messages. As employee participation grows, Yammer becomes a corporate social network, discussion board, and knowledge base all rolled into one easy-to-use interface.

Connect and share with people in your company or organization

via Yammer : Enterprise Microblogging.

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‘But I Don’t Want to Teach My Students How to Use Technology

Adapting to information technology does not necessarily mean using technology at all, but it does require an understanding of how education has been irreversibly altered.

The technology in itself is fascinating, but the fundamental cultural and human truth underlying information technology as a medium is that it is the super-medium, the third medium after spoken language and writing that has most fundamentally molded humanity.

One effect of information technology is a stronger sense of the social aspects of learning and the ready connections now available to groups of people, groups in many cases that have formed because of their access to the Web and the Internet. To a student in a class who is busy e-mailing or texting with someone outside the classroom, the classroom walls are permeable and irrelevant: Conversations for him or her are going on that either compete with or augment in-class conversations, depending on whether the teacher is resistant to or comfortable with social media.

To believe that somehow teaching and learning can occur now in a bubble as if the information technology revolution has not occurred is to live in a delusional world. It is not that we all have to be pioneers or early adopters, but we educators have to be at least curious and willing to better understand how the entire knowledge culture in our world has been altered and about how all assumptions about knowledge have been disrupted.

In a disrupted world, innovation is the only intelligent path. It is the path toward survival. Innovation, as those of us in the field of formally supporting innovation in higher education use the term, is not change for the sake of change but responsible change, change based on a better understanding of the deep values that higher education is meant to foster, change based on an understanding of the research in our fields, change based on an understanding of how our students’ careers after college will be different than what we may have experienced just ten years ago.

No one on campus is in charge of innovation any longer because innovation is occurring so broadly across campus and across our culture. The knowledge environment has been altered irrevocably. Logistical difficulties may make it impossible for some faculty members to use digital tools in their classrooms, or technical support may be so scarce for them that using technology in a physical classroom may be impossible for now. But no educator can pretend that the terms of knowledge creation and transmission remain unchanged. Even those of us still using a standard typewriter must at least be curious.

Edutopia’s Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media

Tara Rojas discusses using technology in her Spanish course.

via YouTube – Tara Rojas.

Image by DJMcCrady via Flickr

The Sun in Motion can be used for astronomy in general or the solar system in particular.  The sun has never looked so good, and nobody has to go blind to see it.

The Sun in Motion

Image via Wikipedia

Review the tips below and then watch the tutorial for more detailed information.

1. How to select objects on the screen

2. How to duplicate objects and slides

3. Leverage grouping and ungrogrouping of objects

4. Keyboard shortcuts & right clicking

5. Use the grid and guides to help align objects5

via 5 Must-Know PowerPoint Tips That Will Save You Time » The Rapid eLearning Blog.

Image via CrunchBase

Learning Using Google Earth

Google Earth and Google Maps are two of the free resources to learn by creating . Rich Treves has posted, on his Google Earth Design Blog, various detailed lesson plans based on the use of Google Earth.

via  Using Google Earth.