Google Apps For Education

“Google Apps is free for schools. It allows students and teachers to create documents
(Word, Excel, PowerPoint), share calendars, chat and more for free on-line. It is an excellent tool to provide elearning.

‘Frantic troubleshooting by an overworked staff versus someone else fixing problems smoothly. A sliver of server space per person versus a five-gigabyte chunk. Half a million dollars versus free. That’s what colleges are faced with as they decide whether to continue running their own e-mail services or outsource them to a professional service like Google Apps Education Edition’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/11/2008″ Click the title to read more…

Five Ways to Write Magnificent Copy

Most writing could be better.

Not just a little better — significantly better.

If you start out with a solid topic, a good knowledge of your audience, and a reasonable degree of writing ability, you’ll usually end up with a pretty good piece of writing.

But you don’t have to settle for “pretty good.” A little attention to the final details can kick “pretty good” to “magnificent.”

Whether you’re creating blog posts, special reports, sales letters, a video script, email autoresponders, or whatever else, you can take your writing up a level just by applying some simple principles:

via copyblogger.com

I love the first way; write drunk/edit sober. Follow the ‘via’ link to read all 5 ways…

Does the internet make you happy?

Apparently so say the Brits…

“There are those who believe that too much time spent on the Internet makes people less social and causes them to lose touch with the real world, but a new British study released today found that access to the Internet and the web, and especially to social networks such as Facebook, can improve people’s levels of happiness. The study found that Internet access improves the overall well-being of lower-income users, those with less education and women — particularly those in developing countries — by giving them a sense of freedom and control over their lives. The report, which was prepared for the former British Computer Society — now known as BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, with 70,000 members in over 120 countries — found what it calls a “statistically significant, positive impact on life satisfaction” as a result of having access to the Internet. Elizabeth Sparrow, president of BCS, said in a statement released along with the study that: Too often conventional wisdom assumes IT has a negative impact on life satisfaction, but the research has found the opposite to be true. IT has a direct positive impact on life satisfaction, even when controlling for income and other factors known to be important in determining well-being. The study, which was based in part on original research as well as on analysis of earlier studies on well-being and information technology, found that women, those with lower incomes and those with lower educational qualifications benefit the most from access to the Internet. “Much of the improvement in life satisfaction that arises from information technology flows to those on lower incomes or with fewer educational qualifications – what we might call the ‘disempowered’ groups in society,” the BCS report says.” Source: Yes, It’s True: The Internet Makes You Happier: Tech News «

Not convinced? Watch this…

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/979266267

Now you have proof to offer your family, friends, etc. that supports your internet ‘habit’. 😀

via ScribeFire

Want a Raise? Find Out What Your Job is Worth

As a blogger, I get paid in bags of stale Tootsie Rolls. Is that good? I have no idea. Actually, I am getting a better idea of what my job is worth now that I have checked out some salary comparison sites. Specifically, I I’ve found out that there are places you can blog where you’re paid in fresh Tootsie Rolls.

If you want to see how your salary compares to the industry at large, be sure to visit MySalary, a site where you can find salary ranges for virtually any career. There’s a lot of stuff on the site — job search and education information in particular — but be sure to click the Salary tab and enter your job title and zip code. You’ll instantly get access to a slew of job titles that are similar to what you searched for.

The resulting histogram shows national averages for salary ranges, like this one for speech writers (I always wanted to know what Ben Stein used to make).

via bnet.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Show Me the Money: How to Ask for a Raise (lifescript.com)
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Kudos to the Catholic Church…

…for the excellent job they are doing with the ‘Catholics come home‘ campaign — a great combination of traditional and new, online media. Discussing this with my good friend Jim Kelleher of Kelleher Creative in St. Louis, I was pleased to see the church hasn’t lost it’s sense of humor, either.

For those of you who didn’t attend Catholic School, the thing that amuses me is the search box. St. Anthony is the patron saint of “lost things”…

😉

Better than TV

Image by thebittenword.com via Flickr

Interesting perspective on the use of time and intelligence…

“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.” Source: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody

Television is to us, however, what gin was to the British a few hundred years ago and smart people are beginning to take notice…

“Clay Shirky has noticed the trend of talented people putting five or six hours an evening to work instead of to waste. Add that up across a million or ten million people and the output is astonishing. He calls it cognitive surplus and it’s one of the underappreciated world-changing stories of our time.” Source: Seth’s Blog: But it’s better than TV

Think about it! How much time do YOU spend watching tv? How could you use that time to take over your world?

Start me up!

An inside look at my morning routine and the tools I use to bring e1evation.com together…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFHGIoLhyQQ

In case you missed it, I’ve covered Google Reader in depth here, Feedly here, Gist here, and Shareaholic here…

btw, I’m aware this not my best video yet, but I’m learning to use Camtasia which is a powerful, but complex tool. Maybe I should read the manual?!

Framing your social media efforts

When Chris Brogan speaks, I listen. This time I take issue…

“There are three main areas of practice for social media that your company (or you) should be thinking about: listening, connecting, publishing. From these three areas, you can build out your usage of the tools, thread your information networks to feed and be fed, and align your resources for execution. There are many varied strategies you can execute using these toolsets. There are many different tools you can consider employing for your efforts. But that’s the basic structure: listening, connecting, publishing.” Source: Framing Your Social Media Efforts

Why? I think publishing goes BEFORE connecting — your online brand is a big part of what people want to connect to, so I think you have to publish first [after listening of course!]. What say you?

Google Apps Goes Premier

Here’s another move schools and 501(c)3s should make to get off Microsoft Exchange and its expensive licensing…

“Google has launched a new version of Google Apps (formerly Google Apps for Your Domain), and it adds Google Docs & Spreadsheets and a pay service.

There are now two editions of Goofle Apps: the free Standard Edition and the paid Premier Edition. Both editions have Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and a customized start page, [editor; Google also added the ability to create extranet sites 10 days ago as part of the package] no limit to the number of accounts, mobile access, and administrator control panel and web-based support.

Premier Edition differs like so: For $50 per user per year, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee for email, 10 gigabyte inboxes for all email accounts (up from 2 gigs for the free version), the option of removing advertising from Gmail, shared calendars, APIs for integrating existing infrastructure (including single sign-on, user provisioning and management, and support for an email gateway), a limited release of email migration tools, 24/7 phone support, and third party applications and services.

A note: A 99.9% uptime guarantee means your account will be down for no more than 43.829 minutes per month. Google’s getting better, but outages have happened to Gmail, and I’m sure there will be months where Google has to refund a number of customers.

There is a free trial of Google Apps Premier through the end of April. Google Apps is free for schools and other educational institutions, as well as free for families and groups, which is really just another way of saying that those people can only sign up for the free version.”

With the UW school system looking at making the move to Google Apps for Domains, what would prevent our local schools from moving in this direction as well? Click here to read more…

Social Media for Parents…

Sorry for being so goofy lately, but after speaking on ‘Facebook for Fun and Profit’ for ‘Link Greater Green Bay‘ on Wednesday, I couldn’t pass this one up…

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theonion.com%2Fcontent%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FE-Mom_article_9_1.jpg&videoid=97699&title=Facebook%2C%20Twitter%20Revolutionizing%20How%20Parents%20Stalk%20Their%20College-Aged%20Kids