Thing 15: Productivity Tools

A few years ago the school district purchased Adobe CS 3 and since then I have had a full version of Adobe Acrobat on my laptop.  I have found it quite valuable to not only see .pdf files (a fairly ubiquitous file type for documents meant to be seen in their original form), but also to create .pdf's from Word files, Comic Life pages, etc.  What I really need to do is spend time with some of the more interesting bells and whistles of Acrobat, like forms, comments, markups, interactive pages, etc. 
I tried to get Media-Convert to load, but it wouldn't.  I used Zamzar before and in a crunch I would use it again. In my job as media specialist, I find having applications on my laptop much more convenient than using an online file converter.  It is a daily occurrence for kids to come in with the .docx files or other Windows files need to be converted to earlier versions.  They also some in with Word Perfect files, AppleWorks files, Microsoft Works files, etc. and I need a variety of software to do the job.  I keep the latest version of Microsoft Office on my laptop along with Open Office, Neo Office, Pages, Numbers and Keynote. The number of kids toting Macs in school is remarkable. It certainly would be cheaper to use an online converter and I have shown kids where to find them and also had kids create text files, etc. using Google Docs, but typically they need this paper, Powerpoint, spreadsheet NOW and can't wait for their document to be converted and sent back to them by email. 
When I want to convert video, I go a bit old school and use a very good application on my desktop: iSkysoft Video Converter. I found that Zamzar was just too slow.  iSkysoft cost me $40 and is worth every penny.  I purchased it because I wanted to convert the YouTube videos I downloaded into a more Mac friendly form.  I download online videos from YouTube and other sites using an Firefox addon called Fast Video Download.  It is one of many, and may not be the best, but it does what I want.  Once I download a video or segments of videos, I can join them and convert them to .avi, .mov, m4v, etc.  I can also take a full video that I have and segment it into file sizes more easily dealt with. 
I created a Google Calendar to link with the AP World History course for the summer. I am working on embedding it on a page of my iWeb-based web site for the course.  I am hoping that using the Google Calendar is easier to work with than the Mobile Me iCal calendars I have used in the past.