Thursday, May 31, 2012

Vacation Setting in Your Email

If you are going to be gone from work for a conference, maternity leave, or some other reason you may want to set up your vacation settings. This will not stop emails from coming to your inbox, but it will let the sender of the email know that you are currently not available.  This lets people emailing you understand why you are not answering emails, and if need be they can contact someone else if there is an emergency.  You can set it to only send your away message to people at MJSD and/or people in your contacts so you are not letting the whole world know you are gone. 

To set this up:
  1. Log into your email.
  2. Click on the gear located on the upper right hand side.
  3. Click on Mail Settings




 4. Scroll down until you find Vacation Responder


5. Then click next to Vacation Responder On
6. Choose the dates you will be gone
7. In the message section write a generic message, you don't have to be detailed about why you are gone.  Also remember to include an alternate contact if they need to get a hold of someone ASAP.
8. Under the message box you can choose if you want to send your vacation responder to only those in your contacts, only those at MJSD, and if you do not choose either of those it will go to anyone who emails you (including spammers).

9.  Then remember to scroll down and save changes.
10. Then your vacation responder is all set-up!

It might not be a good idea to turn this on over the summer, unless you have contacts outside of the school district who contact you often.  Otherwise as school secretaries and other staff members try to email you over the summer they will be receiving lots of away messages from people.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Time to Back Up your Files!

Time to back up your files! We all have received the email warning us to back up our files before we leave for the summer. But do you really know how to back up your files? The video below will show you step by step how to back up your file on a flash drive or a CD-R

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Wisc-Online is a digital library of web-based learning resources called learning objects.  The learning objects are developed by the Wisconsin Technical College System and anyone can create an account and access the learning objects.  From experience most of the objects are very high quality and interactive and if you can find something that mirrors the topics you are covering they are a great resource.  Wisconsin Technical Colleges provide our students a great service making the learning objects available.  They are defiantly  worth checking out.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Picmonkey - Free Photo Editor

Sometimes you need a quick tool to use to edit your photos. I am a fan of the website Picmonkey to edit my photos. It is free and easy to use. There is no login needed to use this web tool. Just upload your picture and begin editing. Once you edit your photo you can re-save the photo and continue on with your work.

The ways you can edit your photo:

Basic Edits (crop, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen the image and resize)
Effects (change the coloring effects of the photo)
Touch Up (allows for editing of people - airbrushing, teeth editing, etc.)
Text (add text over the image)
Overlays (images and shapes that look like stamps on your main image)
Frames (variety of frames around your image)
Texture (add textures such as metal and paint over your photo)

Click the blue rectangle to select picture you want to edit from your computer.
On your next screen you will have your editing controls on the left side of the screen.  At the bottom of the control area  is the option to save your edited picture. 

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Syncing Your Work Calendar and/or Email with Your Devices

Did you know you can synch your work calendar with your Android phone?  Or your your work calendar and email with your iPhone or iPad (or iPod Touch)?  Well you can, and the videos below will help walk you through syncing our school gmail account with your devices.

Syncing your email and calendar with your iPad or iPhone:


Syncing your work google calendar with your Android phone: