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Day two from the Google Midwest Summit .  No snow in the forecast today - it's sunny, blue skies and a crisp 42 degrees in the Dells.   Day one was a great experience both as a presenter and a learner.  I'm eager for another day of learning, and I'll be touching base with a few attendees from yesterday's session on Google Sites . Read on for more notes, links, and goodies picked up from day two.

Great day of sharing and learning at the 2nd Annual Midwest Google Summit (Wisconsin Dells, WI). I began the morning working with close to 100 attendees on creating and editing Google Sites . We had a lot of great ideas, questions, and I hope that everyone walked away with something new. With my presenter duties completed (thank you conference schedulers!), I got to sit back and enjoy the work of other presenters.  Hit the jump for some notes from the day one sessions.

This topic came up on our Google Certified Teacher Group and I was so excited to see that there was a possibility of pre-populating Google Forms (thanks E. Curts for the source link). With this capability, you can have fields pre-filled with specific data (like an email appendage), checkboxes pre-slugged, or address fields pre-populated (different forms for different states, cities, etc.). Lots of possibilities and just a minimal amount of legwork in adjusting the URL. Hit the jump for the Google support link and a 2-minute tutorial.

It's that time of year, no not the holiday where you have your kids dress up as baby animals and solicit neighbors for candy. No, it's professional development conference season, and we're hitting the ground running starting in November. I'll be presenting at a few local conferences, waiting for word on the big state and national ones, and will be co-chairing the local Mini-Conference held in January of next year.  Hit the jump for more details on each of them, and let me know if you'll be attending!

This one has been out for awhile. In fact, I wrote a post in 2011 on this very capability.  However, I went ahead and created documentation and a video since the topic still comes up frequently.  Teachers (or anyone for that matter) occasionally request editing of PDF documents. Although PDFs are meant for viewing only, there are times when we want to be able to access an editable version in a word processor. Google Docs has a handy PDF converter built in, and it does a pretty decent job of converting, especially if you're looking at just a bunch of text in your document. First, you'll convert to a Google Doc, and if you need some Microsoft goodness in there, you'll need to download as such. Here's the tutorial guide and a YouTube video is embedded after the jump.

I was able to sneak in a 15 minute lunch, but other than that, I was again on the move throughout the building working in a lot of different classrooms. More setup on the iPad carts working with a few teachers, and then we successfully used the Chromebooks with three classes today. Coupled with Hapara's Teacher Dashboard, we've got a powerful solution for Google Apps and one that makes it very efficient for teachers to stay organized with their students' documents. Here are some of today's SBS moments. (I'm changing the acronym to Solved By Searching - . I just couldn't live with WILTs!) Burning a Data Disc on Mac/PC I need to make a quick copy of a DVD for backup purposes.  First, I looked up a free solution for PCs ( CD Burner XP - works for Windows 7 as well), but then realized that I needed to do it on the Mac.  Apparently, OS X does this through Disk Utility, so it was a quick and easy procedure . Screen Capturing on a Google Chromebook Lastly, I wan...

It's presentation week for me, as I co-led an in-house learning strand on Monday for our school, followed by a 2-hour workshop at IETC on Wednesday, and tomorrow it's off to NCTE for a 1+ hour workshop on Tablet PCs. Although I'm looking forward to some turkey and time on the couch, I wanted to reflect for a brief moment on my presentation.

As I wrap up another introduction training of Google Apps to students, I wanted to pause and reflect on how much good can come out of increased usage of Docs alone by our students.  Thanks to an updated campaign to encourage our incoming freshmen to log in and check their email, we've gotten a large spike in users testing out the Google Apps waters. After the jump are a few items I make sure to bring up during my presentations. If you're not using Docs yet, educationally or personally, perhaps, you'll try it out after reading the following.

As more teachers create their websites and more students set up portfolios using Google Apps, it becomes increasingly likely that both parties will stumble upon "more gadgets" and the bounty of gadgets that come with a potentially unfiltered part of the application. I wrote in an earlier post  how to setup DGDM , a gadget management feature that easily limited what was either shown (whitelist) or not shown (blacklist) when site creators went searching for gadgets. Later, I created a video tutorial that demonstrated the process from start to finish. Recently, a fellow GCT (Google Certified Teacher) created a site that included his own tutorials as well as a category listing for specific gadgets useful for educators.  Check it out here: Gadgets4schools  and read more after the jump for a few of our teachers' favorites gadgets.

It is hard to believe that it's been over one week since my five days of non-stop edtech goodness in the city of brotherly love. Although my walking shoes have been thanking me for taking a break, I have had some time to reflect with satisfaction on another year of learning new information, tips, and tricks as well as setting job related goals for the upcoming school year.

One of the earliest experiences I had with Google Sites when we started using Google Apps for Education was noticing all of the cool gadgets that you could use in Sites. Unfortunately, many gadgets were also inappropriate and able to fly in under our school's filter. With Domain Gadget Directory Manager (DGDM), we can set up a "White List" filter and specifically choose which gadgets to allow for users on the domain. Alternatively, one can also create "Black List" filter to exclude specific gadgets. I chose to implement the former due to the large number and possible expansion of inappropriate gadgets. A video tutorial on how to set up DGDM follows after the jump.

Recently, I had a request to convert a PDF into an editable document, and although we have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional, that would have meant assigning a ticket and waiting for an install on the user's machine. Instead, I remembered and then recommended that the teacher try the "Convert PDF to Google Doc feature." Before completing selling it to other teachers with similar requests, I gave it a quick test run with the following results.

This week, I had a teacher request an introduction and ongoing support for Prezi . I'm a big fan of the zooming presentation editor and have written several posts about the tool.  For this assignment, the class was divided into 3 groups, and each group had approximately 6-8 students. This represented a perfect opportunity to test the collaborative features of Prezi in a live student environment. After some minor testing with a few dummy accounts, we were ready to go.

Image via CrunchBase One of the most common calls I get on Google Docs is when the user opens their documents and finds that their language settings have been altered without their knowledge. Often, this results in the inability to effectively work in Docs, so I've created a video that illustrates how to identify the settings needed in order to change the language back to the desired choice.  Check out the YouTube embed after the jump.

Image via Wikipedia Article first published as Why I Need to Use Three Web Browsers Everyday on Blogcritics. With new versions of web browsers coming out regularly, including the heralded Firefox 4 (released on Tuesday), I am excited but certainly not holding my breath that the next version will be the one to rule them all. As it stands, I open multiple browsers daily, as each has their own strengths and weaknesses. On top of that, certain web applications or websites work better with specific browsers, and I have no choice as these applications are essential for my work as a teacher, a staff developer, a blogger, and recently, an editor .

Article first published as Apple and Google's Popularity Described in Three Words on Technorati. After reading an article on Apple and Google's respective positioning as the top two most admired companies in the world , I couldn't help but 1) agree with the rankings, 2) further reflect on what makes them so great, and 3) come up with three words for each company that offers some additional reasoning on their climb to the top.

Perhaps, it's because I use Groups mostly through our school domain, which is not currently set for pre-release features, or perhaps, it's because I've been so consumed with other work, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the new Google Groups features when logging into my personal Gmail account this morning. Apparently, users were given opt-in options starting late last year , but I swear the link only popped into my account recently. Anyways, here's three reasons why educators may be particularly interested in the new Groups.

When I recently discovered that Google had resumed sending out Cr-48's, I was being picked up by my wife and we were on our way to our first date night as parents without the baby. I promptly asked, "Did I receive any packages today?" She casually replied, "Oh yeah, there was one." "And...?" I pondered. "Oh, it just said Chrome on it." Classic, and thus began my weekend, chock full of exploration and excitement over the new hardware initiative from the folks in Mountain View . After a week of playing and a day long conference, here are my thoughts and how they tie in with future education deployments.

Welcome NICE Conference Attendees! Here's the Prezi for our Senior Studies and Google Sites presentation : Accompanying the presentation is  a handout which can be accessed here . For more thoughts on Technology,  please consider subscribing to the RSS feed or through email .