Posts made in December 5th, 2009

Mini Wireless Keyboard and Touchpad Gadget

Posted on Dec 5, 2009 in Hardware, Interactive Whiteboards, Useful Links | 7 comments

Here’s another option for those times that teachers want to interact with something they are displaying on their whiteboard (or just on a projector) without having to go to the computer.

This mini wireless touchpad and keyboard is an inexpensive way device that could be quite handy for use in the classroom. Want the students to do a drag and drop task? Pass this around the classroom. Want simple text input? this would do that too. I found it slightly easier to use than a tablet. You still have to look at the screen rather than the pad, like you do with a tablet, but I found it much more like using a laptop touchpad.

I found them on Ebay for about £30 inc postage to the UK (shipped from Hong Kong). Or you can get them in Maplins in the UK for £39.99. Mine has just arrived, so I haven’t had a chance to test the full range of it yet, but the blurb says it can have a range of 10m. Not brilliant, but should cover a standard classroom?

The device comes with a charging lead (it charges from USB) and a receiver. I plugged it into my Windows 7 laptop and it installed painlessly.

It’s definitely an interesting little device which does provide a little more flexibility in how you use your Interactive Whiteboard resources with a class.

Dropbox – file sharing made easy

Posted on Dec 5, 2009 in Useful Links | 0 comments

I’ve recently discovered a fantastic application called Dropbox and I wanted to share it with you.

Dropbox is a free application (with paid extras if you want more space) which gives a really easy way of storing and synchronising files across multiple computers.

I installed Dropbox onto my main home PC, and also onto my two training laptops. It creates a dropbox folder in the My Documents of each computer. When I want to make a file available I just copy and paste it into the dropbox folder.

The next time I connect my laptop to the internet, dropbox checks for new or updated files and updates the dropbox folder on the laptop.

This is excellent for presentations, where I sometimes edit powerpoint files or IWB files. I can then drop it into the dropbox and all my other computers get the most recent version of that file.

As well as that – you can also access your Dropbox area via the web. So if I am on a school machine and I really need a copy of that presentation, I can just log in to Dropbox and save it to the local machine I am on.

And.. even more brilliantly you can get a Dropbox iPhone app, which lets you see all the content of your Dropbox on your phone. And even open up Office files and images. Excellent.

It’s made sharing files between my laptop and desktop so much easier. It’s an amazing little app. You get 2GB of storage for free (which you can extend slightly if you refer others) and then you can get 50GB for $9.99 a month or 100GB for $19.99 a month. I’m still using the free version for now – it’s enough for the type of files I want to swap between computers. I’m not using it for cloud system backups just yet.

Dropbox also gives you a public-facing area which will let you share files with others. So for example I can put a file into the Public folder, and share the link with other people. So here’s a very small notebook file : Paired Words. or my War of the Worlds wordle.

Go get Dropbox now.