Open Loops

14 Ways Evernote Can Help Principals Manage Schools

As a school administrator, I help manage over 100 employees in my school.  We have roughly 750 students, well over 1,000 parents, an active PTA, many committees and a multitude of data that must be tracked and, even more importantly, managed.

Education is increasingly data driven.  You are only as good as your latest data.  In addition, just like all other employers, we principals and assistant principals must manage every employee in our buildings: teachers, custodians, cafeteria staff, teacher assistants and office personnel.  Observations and evaluations must be completed and tracked throughout the year.  Schedules are developed to keep every department and grade level running in sync with all the others.  Our customers (i.e., our parents) constantly come to us with a plethora of concerns: how to help their child at home, concerns about a teacher, bullies, excessive absences and transportation concerns, to name a few.  Managing all this is a balancing act, with every moment full of the possibility of everything cascading into chaos with the mismanagement or misfiling of even one important piece of information.  Because of this, I moved to Evernote to assist our school in running smoothly.

Google Gears Takes Gmail Offline!

Google slowly continues to grow in the way it uses Google Gears.  Now, Gmail goes offline!  Using Gears technology, Gmail begins the building the bridge between web app and email client.  After activating the offline mode in Labs, clicking the new offline icon next to one's email address at the top begins the process of bringing all your Gmail -- every gig of it -- to your hard drive, keeping it synchronized with Google's servers.

The offline experience adds an outbox and faster response times, although the initial synchronization can take a while depending on the amount of mail in your account. Thereafter, everything is kept sync'd.  Offline mode kicks in automatically when the connection to Google is lost and everything is updated when the connection is restored.

Warning!  Being a Labs feature, it's technically experimental in nature and you might hit a few snags here and there.  It also may take a few days before you see the offline feature in your Labs offerings.

via The Official Gmail Blog

Storming the Matrix: Can You Live Online?

In the movie, "The Matrix", the hero spends all his time trying to escape from living in a computer generated world.  It's funny to think that there are those of us who would prefer the opposite, and want to storm the matrix to get inside, living completely in a digital world.  We are coming very close to that with web apps that are improving each day to the point that it is very tempting.

Is it possible that one can do everything one needs to do to accomplish required tasks and achieve goals by using online tools only?  That question popped in my mind years ago when I read a quote from Bill Gates who said that the future would be oriented to an online world and that Microsoft would lead the way.  Since then, with the proliferation of WiFi hot spots, home wireless networks and wireless cards for laptops, as well as the new Google Gears that allow web applications to work offline, that future is close to being here.  However, Microsoft is not leading the way.  Instead, one of Microsoft's top officers stated that they are now years behind other companies in preparing viable web applications that Bill Gates promised.  Other companies, however, have blazed the way with webapps that promise everything that installed software promises -- but are available anywhere, anytime, on any computer.

2000 Bloggers Can't Be Wrong

What do Mark Cuban, Donald Trump, Rosie and I have in common?  We have all been chosen to be in Tino Buntic’s 2000 Bloggers project! 

According to Technorati, there are 55 million blogs out there.  That’s hard to fathom.  Tino Buntic’s 2000 Bloggers project attempts to bring 2K of them together in one web site.  That’s only .0036% of all blogs!  I was pleased to find out that Open Loops was one of the first 100 chosen to be included!  That is only .00018% of all blogs!  Sweet!

Click the link below and take a look at the 2K kids as it stands today!  By the way Tino, nice touch putting Rosie and the Donald side by side!

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords

Most people think their passwords are secure.  Bruce Schneier thinks otherwise and writes a very compelling piece:

"Ever since I wrote about the 34,000 MySpace passwords I analyzed, people have been asking how to choose secure passwords.
My piece aside, there's been a lot written on this topic over the years -- both serious and humorous -- but most of it seems to be based on anecdotal suggestions rather than actual analytic evidence. What follows is some serious advice."

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/choosing_secure.html

Find Any Computer File...FAST!

“Let me show you this file.  I think I put it in My Documents.  Wait a minute, maybe I put it on the desktop.  Surely, I haven’t deleted it.  Let me look in another folder.  Nope, not there.  Let me run a search.  First, I’ll check the My Documents folder.  Wait — I looked in there didn’t I?  What did I name that file, anyway?  Okay, I’ll search the whole damned C: drive.  How long will that take?   ARRGGHH!!”

Taming Your Outlook Inbox

Richard Kuo's Personal Blog : Optimize your life #3 - how to manage e-mail effectively (1/2)

Those of you who read my email rant last year, know that I stand among those who say that misuse of email is the biggest waste of productivity that I know.  Richard Kuo adds a little more information on how to make Outlook heel, sit-up, roll-over, and play dead instead of dragging you out of your office for a walk when it wants to.  Check out his two articles to see how to silence new mail notifications and to configure your personal folders to be GTD-friendly.

Google Releases New Calendar Component

Google released its new calendar.  This was something that I've been waiting on for a few months after hearing rumors of it.  For years I've used a variety of calendar programs for work and personal uses.  Between Outlook, Yahoo!, and, most recently, EssentialPIM.  I was very interested in Google's offering, due to Google's reputation for innovation.  I have to say, I was very disappointed.

Of the features it offers, most have been available to Yahoo! members for years.  Shared calendars, reminders, and guest invitation to meetings offer nothing new.  The two nice features, however, are the speed of entry and the ease of changing days and times of appointments.  One can write the appointment right on the calendar page, with no details of course, and it is posted immediately without having to use an additional dialogue box.  To add details, make the appointment repeating, or to invite guests, one has to use the dialogue box.  If the appointment needs to be changed, it can be done by clicking and dragging.  Other than these enhancements -- and they are nice -- the calendar is found lacking.

There is no notes section.  There is no To Do list component.  Other than a very small text link at the top that takes one to Gmail, there are no other components that are integrated to make this a truly useful PIM the way that Yahoo! has theirs configured.  If one needs contact information, one has to go to Gmail and use the contacts section there.  As a PIM, it just feels disjointed.

To sum it up, the speed of entry and ease of changing times and days of appointments are a step in the right direction.  Past that, the new Google calendar is no better than any other web-based calendar and falls short of being a useful PIM.

Tags: GTD, Time Management, Productivity

Jump Drives - Productivity on a Key Chain

New technologies — and I include hacks in this category — are always fertile ground for making one’s life more efficacious and efficient.  One of the hottest technologies is finally coming of age and is ripe for use in making one’s productivity soar.  That technology is the humble jump drive.

Also known as flash drives, these simple plastic devices are the natural replacements of floppy discs.  Affordable units are available from 64 MB units the size of a penny to 2 GB drives that fit neatly on a key chain.  As technology advances, memory capacity is growing at an astounding rate while prices are falling.  When first introduced, the problem for some operating systems was that they required a driver to be installed prior to use.  Even then some computers still refused to recognize them.  That has changed and most computers seem to accept them as an additional drive very easily.

At first glance, one will assume that the best use for these pocket drives is simple storage of files.  Indeed, for the last two years, I’ve done exactly that.  In fact, I have three years worth of documents related to my profession and still have over half of the memory space still available.  This ended the hassle of e-mailing myself documents to work on at home and then e-mailing them back to work.  Now I simply set up a “Briefcase” (a windows folder designed to carry copies of documents from one computer to another while keeping both sets updated) on my jump drive and work from that folder at home.  I open my folder and see the exact same set up that I have at work.  Every morning, I update my files with one click.

Back Online With an Amazing Technology!

PlumChoice Computer Help

After updating my virus definitions, my computer started acting strange.  It began to start very slowly.  When it was finally up and running, the firewall stopped me from getting online.  It also began to refuse to shut down. So what did I do?  Closed it up and headed to Best Buy to have their “Geek Squad” rescue my proverbial behind.  The “geek” behind the desk made me feel right at home and left me with a feeling that my machine was in good hands.  Little did I know that my great misadventure with Best Buy had begun.