Technical Education

Is it Monday already? Welcome to the latest edition of Monday Productivity Pointers. Last week I talked about Google Hangouts. This week I’m creating presentations on the iPad using Keynote, Apple’s presentation software. This weeks first video will cover the actual creation of a presentation on the iPad.

Not only can you create gorgeous presentations quickly on your Apple computer, you can also create them on the road with your iPad. I’ll show you how to create a presentation based on an existing template, and how to add content to it.

Here’s a neat feature of Keynote for the iPad: if you have two photos on a slide that aren’t the same size, you can easily make them match. Tap and drag in the bottom corner of the mismatched photo on a slide. While you are dragging, use another finger to tap and hold the photo you are trying to match the size of. Instantly, the photo you are dragging will become the same size as the other photo, and you can let go with both fingers. Ta-da!

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Officials at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. have been notified that the nationally ranked liberal arts college was selected as one of the Colleges of Distinction from Missouri.

Only six Missouri colleges and universities were cited for this honor. Colleges and universities are nominated by high school counselors.

Colleges of Distinction is a national college guide to undergraduate schools for students, counselors and parents that bases its findings on the engagement of the students, the quality of the teaching, the vibrancy of the campus community and the success of its graduates.

The research staff of the company interviews staff and faculty at the schools under consideration, gains information from college admissions experts around the country and collects feedback from administrators at other colleges and high school counselors across the country.

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Some snow & some cold for St. Pats weekend

We’ve got another Alberta Clipper headed our way.  Skies will be partly sunny this morning and mostly cloudy this afternoon with highs in the low and mid 40′s.

Scattered showers develop this evening and will change over to light snow showers overnight.  This is not a big snowmaker – with accumulations of less than an inch in spots by daybreak Saturday morning.  The snow heads east by afternoon and we’ll see some gradual clearing with chilly highs in the mid 30′s.

St. Patrick’s Day looks like the pick of the weekend as we’ll see some sunshine.  Under partly cloudy skies with remain a good 10 degrees below normal with highs in the mid 30′s.

Another weak Clipper heads our way early next week.

Have a great weekend & St. Patrick’s Day!

Parents whose children attend Pinellas County’s fundamental schools like to think they’re getting the best education available, but one researcher is putting that theory to the test.

Matthew Chingos, a researcher with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is wrapping up a yearlong study on whether Pinellas County’s fundamental schools are as effective as they claim to be.

“The hypothesis that these families have, who put their kids on massive waiting lists to get in, is that these schools are better then the alternative,” Chingos said. “But of course you never know if that’s really true until you actually look at the data.”

Fundamental schools mirrors charter schools in their focus on strict discipline but are free and operate through the school district.

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Sometimes you want to watch an entire lynda.com course to learn a new skill, and other times you need the answer to a specific question. But when your search terms apply to multiple content areas, you may end up with search results that are of little help.

Recent improvements to our website now allow you to easily refine your search results to quickly find what you need. I will walk you through two examples.

Lets say youre working with some video clips and you want to know how to use a clipping mask—a feature used across design or video workflows and in multiple applications. However, clipping is also a term used in audio editing.

1. To find what youre looking for, start by typing clipping mask in the search field found in the navigation bar at the top of any lynda.com page.

2. By default, lynda.com returns a list of courses that cover the clipping mask feature. B

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