Setting Your Computer / Projector Display Options

Are you having trouble getting your Computer / Projector to project the way you want?

Everyone's Projector / Computer / Doc Camera combination is different so there isn't one easy solution, but here's what I've discovered works the best the most often...

Connect the Computer to your projector.
Open your Display Settings. You might have it up in your menu bar.

Or you might get there by going to Apple>System Preferences>Displays

First you want to make sure your Mirror Display is turned on. It looks like this:

And then go back to the Display tab and choose the setting that is 1024 x 768. There will be another window open titled Color LCD (or something similar) Set that one to 1024 x 768 (stretched).

It looks like this from the System Preferences window

and it looks like this from the Menu bar

If you set these and then disconnect, it should come back the way you left it the next time you turn it on...unless you click on the "Turn Off Mirroring". That sort of resets everything and you'll have to put them back again.

It's not perfect, but setting things this way has given me the best results so far. Let me know if you have a better system for making your display awesome!  And Good luck!

Update: I'm also having better luck on a few systems with the 1152x720 setting. Try both.

Wishing SMART was Smarter...

It's the start of a new year, and for many of us the start of Mac's new Lion operating system.
Woohoo?

Here at Highland that also means many of us got switched to the new SMART Notebook version 11 which looks and acts different than it did last year. Here are two things we're noticing.

1. There is this little SMARTInk Layer button that seems to show up on everything now. Why?

Here is a short little video that explains what it is and how to use it.

It can be kind of handy, but if you don't like it you can turn it off when you disconnect your SMARTboard.  Just click that little down arrow and choose Erase and Hide. (This option only shows up when the board is disconnected).

2. The other thing we've noticed is this obnoxious display glitch when you try to go full screen!

Yes, this a ridiculous issue. Why don't we have the option of making "Entire Page" the default? Why wasn't that already the default?  Here's me wishing SMART had been a little smarter on this one...

Backing Up Your Data

Just like Bookends... I blog at the beginning of the school year and then again at the end. Oh brother! Such is the life of a busy student, I guess. Ha!

Here we are, at the end of the year, and we need to Back Up all the pictures and videos of those precious little faces.

I get a lot of questions about what external hard drive to buy, how much it will cost, etc. It changes, of course, but I did a little digging around and here's what I know as of today:

How Big of a Hard Drive do I Need?

If you make movies a lot you'll need way more.
If you don't save pictures or movies you'll need way less.
Here is an article that describes  the Megabyte-Gigabyte-Terabyte thing. It's helpful.
But here's the short, un-scientific version:

• 1MB -Is about the size of the information in a medium sized novel.
• 1GB -Is a little over a thousand Megabytes (a thousand novels?)
• 1TB -This is about the same amount of information as all the books in a large library or 1610 CDs worth of data. 

How does this translate to pictures and movies? Depends.
I bought a 320GB a few years ago. I put about 7 years of family photos on it plus a bunch of other stuff and it's only about one-third full today. Does that help?
Really high-res photos and videos take up more space.

What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

You can get a 500GB for around $70 right now. Here are a couple with good reviews, but you might check for sales at Costco or OfficeMax.

Seagate -$70

Western Digital -$65

If you bump up to a Terabyte you're looking at around $100

Here's How to Partition Your Drive

Can I Use the Same External Drive to Backup My PC and my Mac?

You can, but it takes a little fudging with.
Here's a great article about how to make that happen. It even has a video that will walk you through it. (I have to do this to mine.  It was set up for my PC out of the box, so my PC files are saved to it. I can get files off of it and use them on my Mac, but I can't save Mac files to the drive...yet. I think I'll partition it, like the article says)

How To Ensure Your Privacy In Facebook

Some of us love our Facebook, some of us hate it, but most of us are on it.

So what do you do when one of your students sends you a Friend request? It can feel like it oversteps your professional boundary, but they're so cute...you don't want to reject them! Here's how to set up your privacy settings so that you can accept their request and still keep your privacy.

 First Create A Friend List and put your kiddos on it (their parents too if you feel like it)
(If you can't see these screenshots, just click on them...)

Go ahead and add people to the list.

  Now Change Your Security Settings To Exclude That List.

 Now whenever you post a status, this list will not see it, unless you change this setting.

You can lock down everything and make it seem like you're just never on FB, or you can leave up some pictures, etc. And the cool thing is, you can always change this on the fly...if you post a status or photo you want everyone to see, you can change it right from there. Just look for that little Custom gear!
*Do pay attention though...when you change this setting in a status update, that change becomes your new default so be SURE you change it back!

Voila. You're back to having a Professional AND a Personal life! :)

The "Worst Parent EVER!"

Ever had one of those? a Worst Parent Ever! moment?


Last night was my official inauguration into the Worst Parent Ever club. It was the night before the first day of school…correction: the night before the first day of Middle School for my brilliant, geeky, funny but sensitive and sometimes pessimistic youngest guy. He’s awesome, and his new school is going to be awesome and everything was awesome… until bedtime. The Man and I always do one last email check before bed (geeks through-and-through), so we both discovered the email at the exact same time.

And gasped at the exact same time.

It was a friendly little note from the director of Jordan’s new school:
“What a great first day at school! The kids did an amazing job and it was wonderful to see our new and improved campus filled up with happy faces. Clearly we are going to have a great year.”

Yeah. Alternate reality, right? Whose life did I accidentally slip into just now? The first day of school is tomorrow. It’s tomorrow!

Nope.

We missed the first day of middle school. Epic. Beautiful. Glorious. Swan-Dive-Into an empty pool-Failure!

To my credit, they did start a day earlier than the public schools this year and the rest of us are all public schoolers. But on the “ridiculous fail” side, I honestly clicked that stupid “First Day Of School” link no less than 25 times this week and apparently never actually read the message there even once. So Brilliant.

We laugh in this family. It's a dang good thing.
We decided he can use this excuse for just about everything now. Doesn’t all of life hinge on that first day of middle school?
How many job interviews could he be late for and say, “Yeah, well…my parents made me miss the first day of middle school and I’ve been catching up ever since.” Who wouldn’t have pity on that kid, right?
Card games lost: “I missed the first day of middle school.”
Girlfriends dumped: “Yeah, I missed the first day of middle school.”
Fails the math final: “It must have been what I missed that first day of middle school.”

So as it turns out, we’ve given him a great gift after all, you see.
He now has,
The freedom to fail.
(...oh, and also we bought him the large size at Cuppa Yo after school today).

That's also why I decided to go ahead and write a post about my most fantastic parenting failure to date. Giving ourselves the freedom to fail is the starting place for so many great stories, so many courageous successes! And now I bequeath that to you.

You, my dear friends, now have the freedom to make a creative and far-reaching plethora of legitimate mistakes and all the while, you'll be able to say:  "Yeah, but I had this friend once who totally spaced her kid's first day of middle school."

See that? I can be generous that way (...which probably mostly has to do with the fact that I had the large size at Cuppa Yo today too).

Go ahead. Fail. Laugh. Try again. Laugh some more.
That'll be the policy in our family. At least for as long as there is a Cuppa Yo.



And Jordan?
Jordan's been busy all afternoon coming up with reason after reason why he's the luckiest kid on the block...having not had to go to the first day of middle school.

Geez, I love him!