Eric Stoller's Blog

Last year I participated in the NACADA Technology Seminar. This year, the NACADA Technology Seminar will be offered in conjunction with 3 NACADA Regional Conferences. I’ll be leading the technology seminar at the Region 8 conference in Seattle. Laura Pasquini, University of North Texas and Clay Schwenn, University of Washington, will also be facilitating sessions during the 2 day event.

The NACADA Region 8 Conference Technology Seminar will be a hands on, interactive advising technology experience with a focus on utilizing the latest web-based technologies including: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, Facebook Pages, RSS/Content Re-purposing, MS Outlook Enhancements, Web Statistics/Assessment, Online Surveys/Forms, Web Video/Audio and Social Bookmarking. In addition to learning how to use these tools, attendees will be given the tools to implement an academic advising oriented social media communications planning framework.

This seminar is for advisors who identify as having an intermediate to advanced comfort level with technology. Participants will be expected to bring a wi-fi capable laptop. This seminar is for advisors who want to go beyond signing up for a Facebook profile and boldly go forward with expanding their technology implementations/expertise.

Hello NACADA Tech Participants,

Welcome to the NACADA Technology Seminar!

Along with the other seminar faculty – Laura, George & Karen – I am looking forward to meeting & working with all of you this week in Clearwater, FL. We have been adding information to the NACADA Tech website, and will continue to use this as our central “hub” for all resources, handouts & presentations.

Please take a moment to introduce yourself to the group, so we can get to know one another. Just leave a comment after this blog post that includes:

* Your Name & Professional Role
* Institution Name & Location
* Goals for the Tech Seminar
* Other interesting information or any personal web pages

Safe travels,

Eric

PaperClip Communications is sponsoring a technology summit on Cyber Communities at the University of Tampa in January. I’ll be presenting two sessions on student development theory and the positive aspects of online communities/social networking sites. I’m charged with bringing a positive spin to the summit. I have two hours to educate participants that sites like Facebook and MySpace can add value to a student’s collegiate experience.

The irony of my PaperClip presentation is that they contacted me after they read this post. In the post I expressed my concerns regarding the vilification of technology within student affairs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Digital
Camera Buying Guide at Cnet.com

Digital Camera
Guide from Steve’s DigiCams

USB Flash
Drive review from Ars Technica

Digital Audio Player Reviews
- A great source for information about the latest, greatest MP3
Players/Accessories.

How to burn a
CD-R in Windows XP – Instructions by Sean Pease

CD-R FAQ – All you ever wanted to know
about CD-R’s and “burning”

• Advanced Google
  Search
• Google
  Suggest – Google suggests possible search terms while you type!
• Google Scholar - search scholarly
  literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints,
  abstracts and technical reports. Find articles from a wide variety of academic
  publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as
  well as scholarly articles available across the web.
• Google Compute –
  “Put your computer to work advancing scientific knowledge when it’s not
  helping you.”
• Google Sets - “Automatically
  create sets of items from a few examples”
• Google Maps/Satellite -Mapquest on
  steroids!
• Google Video -Google Video searches
  the closed captioning text of all the programs in Googles archive for relevant
  results.
• Google Desktop Search Tool -
  “With Google Desktop Search, you can search the full text of your email,
  files, viewed web pages, and chats. Specifically, you can search:
  Email
  from Outlook 2000+, Outlook Express 5+, Netscape Mail 7.1+, Mozilla Mail 1.4+
  and Thunderbird
  All the files on your computer, including text, Word,
  Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, MP3, image, audio, and video files. You can even
  search your media files by meta-tag: for instance, by artist name and song
  title, not just the file name.
  Web pages you’ve viewed using Internet
  Explorer 5+, Netscape 7.1+, Mozilla 1.4+ and Firefox.
  Chats from AOL 7+ and
  AOL Instant Messenger 5+ ”
• Google Alerts - “Google Alerts
  are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for
  your search terms. We currently offer three types of alerts: ‘News,’ ‘Web,’
  and ‘News & Web.’ ”
• Google Local - “Google Local is a
  Google search service that helps you locate businesses in a specific
  geographic location. With Google, you can search the worldwide web; with
  Google Local, you can find an auto parts store within walking distance.”
• Use
  Google for Definitions - Search for define –blank–
• Google’s “My Search
  History” – “My Search History allows you to easily access and manage your
  Google web search history from any computer. You can search and browse through
  your search history over time and even check your level of activity on Google
  for any given day.”
• Google Ride Finder - “With
  Google Ride Finder, you can search for taxis, limousines and shuttles and make
  better decisions by seeing the exact location of vehicles in your area. Just
  enter a zip code, the name of a city or even a specific address. You will get
  a map showing the companies and where their vehicles are located”
• Gmail by Google – “Gmail is a free,
  search-based webmail service that includes more than 2,000 megabytes (two
  gigabytes) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search
  engine that quickly finds any message an account owner has ever sent or
  received. That means there’s no need to file messages in order to find them
  again.”
• Google Answers - “Google
  Answers is a way to get that help from Researchers with expertise in online
  searching. When you post a question to Google Answers, you specify how much
  you’re willing to pay for an answer. A Researcher will search for the
  information you want. When they find it, they will post it to Google Answers,
  and you will be notified via email. You will only be charged for your question
  if and when an answer is posted to it. ”
• Froogle by Google - “Froogle is a
  new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products
  for sale online.”
• Google Image Search
  - Find images from all over the world.
• Google Web Search
  Features - “In addition to providing easy access to more than 8 billion
  web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what
  you’re looking for.”
• Google Language Tool -
  Translate words, sentences, web sites and more!
• Google Picasa
  2 – “Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all
  the pictures on your PC.”

Questionpro.com is a terrific online survey tool. The free trial version allows for full functionality. It lets you do skip logic and a whole lot more!
https://www.questionpro.com/

Daily Outlook Tips Archive – Over 250 tips to making Outlook work for you.

Outlook Tips, Tricks and Secrets

Outlook tips from PC Magazine

Allan Wyat’s Microsoft Word tips

Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 tips and tutorials

Multimedia in PowerPoint – The Myers Multimedia FAQ by Austin Myers (PowerPoint MVP)

Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer — look at PowerPoints without owning or installing the application

“Awesome” PowerPoint Tips

PowerPoint FAQs (recommended)

MIT’s Usability Guidelines

Accessibility / Usability Information from Anitra Pavka

Cynthia Says – web page accessibility checker

Accessify – Online Accessibility Resources

Web XACT – 508 / WAI 1,2,3 Analysis Tool

A great interview with Joe Clark, web accessibility master/guru/expert/etc.

W3C HTML Validator

W3C Link Checker (it will tell you if you have any “bad” links)

Color blind simulator

Frequent web page accessibility issues:

• Frames — oftentimes, developers use frames as a convenient means to separate data sets. Frames are usually a virtual roadblock for users with visual impairments due to incompatibility with screen reader technology.
• Alt tags — Alt tags are used to describe images. If an image is used to provide a user with content then the tag needs to correctly identify the image. If an image is used as a design element then the tag needs to be coded as alt=”". This will allow screen readers to pass over an image without wasting a user’s time.
• CSS/XHTML –Structured markup will ensure that when images and formatting are removed, the content of a site will still be accessible for all users.
  Skip navigation links — If navigational menus are duplicated on all pages of a website than a developer should always provide the user with a means to skip the duplicated menu. This will create a heightened usability factor for your user.
• New windows — When a web site opens a new window, a user’s navigation ability can be severely decreased. The back button becomes useless and the ability to navigate to the previous page becomes impossible.

A List Apart: Source for web standards information
http://www.alistapart.com/topics/accessibility/

Assistive Technology Act of 1998
http://section508.gov/docs/AT1998.html

Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center (ITTATC):
National Assessment of State E&IT Accessibility Initiatives
http://www.ittatc.org/laws/state_intro.cfm

International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet
http://www.icdri.org/

Making Web Sites Work for People With Disabilities
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v47/i21/21a03001.htm

National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR)
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/programs.html

Opera: a web browser with several accessibility features
http://opera.com/features/access/

Oregon State University online accessibility documentation
http://www.oregonstate.edu/accessibility

Section 508 Information
http://www.section508.gov

Spazowham Design — “we build sites from raw, organic table-free XHTML and CSS, 100% validated, compliant to W3C standards and Section 508, and ready to run in any browser on any device.”
http://www.spazowham.com/

WebAIM: Accessibility in Mind — Free online accessibility tools
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/articles/freetools/

WebAIM: Accessibility in Mind — Section 508 Web Accessibility Checklist
http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/508checklist.pdf

Web-Based Information and Prospective Students with Disabilities:
A Study of Liberal Arts Colleges
http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm04/eqm0446.asp

Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

More Eric Meyer on CSS

250 HTML and Web Design Secrets

Dan Benjamin’s random image via php: http://automaticlabs.com/products/rotator/

Random image rotation via JavaScript: http://www.dyn-web.com/javascript/rotate-img/rotate-rand.html