Ted Curran.net

Tips, Tricks, and Lifehacks for Online Educators

In trying to boil down the secrets of being a good computer user, I came up with this simple Internet Mantra– please share it with your technophobic friends…

The Internet Mantra: I am unique, but my tech problems are not. Someone has had this problem before me, solved it, and posted the answer online. I need only to find it.

 

“I am unique but my tech problems are not. Someone has had this problem before me, solved it, and posted the answer online. I need onl...

apps
apps (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

This week at work, they replaced my ailing but valiant Dell XP laptop with a new HP Windows7 notebook for work, and then surprised me with a dual‐booting iMac desktop for me to aggressively customize and evaluate the next wave of standard applications w...

G+

With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools. Many universities and K‑12 schools have already adopted Google Apps for Education because of its powerfu...

If you are trying to create a branded online identity, it helps to have a consistent username across all of the major sites. With NameChk.com, you can search once and see if your favorite username is available on 159 different social media sites.

Just enter the username you want in the search ba...

Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay f...

Picture of the new release of Google Chrome OS
Image via Wikipedia

If you haven’t heard of Chrome OS, it’s Google’s attempt to do away with the desktop altogether and have everything that happens on your computer happen inside the browser. This means that instead of opening Outlook for your email, you go to Gmail or Hotmail on th...

John Ward, my High School Math Teacher
John Ward, RIP

 

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place.…

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Wa...

Large Creative Commons Licensed Search in Chrome Omnibar

When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this ex...