Alec+Drachman

Alec Drachman Waverly High School Computer Teacher adrachman@waverlyk12.net

**LanSchool**
First of all, I use LanSchool every day and I pretty much know the program inside and out, so if you have any questions about how to use it, please don't hesitate to shoot me an e-mail or stop by my room. I often see teachers working hard in the ITC who are struggling to keep their students on task. I think most of them don't know that they can completely control all the applications and websites that students are allowed to use. In my class, for example, I only allow a handful of applications: Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. That is pretty much it. Students can't play solitaire or goof around on I-tunes. I don't allow use of Firefox because our version of LanSchool doesn't support it properly. For internet, I often only allow access to a few sites. For example, in my computer apps 101 classes, students are often only allowed to go the Waverly home page, powerschool, and freetypinggame.net. Again, I'll be happy to set up your classes in the ITC in a similar fashion.

At the conferece session on LansSchool, I was introduced to the latest version which offers many advantages over our current version including: support for Firefox, the ability to write and administer multiple choice tests with ease, the abilitly to lock a seating layout, an easier way to save and organize screen snapshots, and a pop-up message that shows students exactly which sites and applications are allowed when you are limiting their computers. I talked to the LanSchool rep. and learned that a site license would cost $999, but would include free updates and support for three years instead on one.

**Cell Phones**
See Amy Henry's page as she has already covered these sessions. The sessions by Liz Kolb were excellent. The ways to communicate with students and parents these days seem nearly endless.

Check out these great websites: http://wiffiti.com/ http://www.textmarks.com/ http://drop.io/

**Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2**
What an amazing program! I wish I had a copy. Unfortunatley, it was not part of the Adobe Creative Suite until CS4 - we have CS3. Still, with the educator discount, a teacher can probably get a copy for around $100 - list price is $299. This program is very simple to use and does an amazing job of organizing, editing, and exporting photos. It is much more intuitive than most other Adobe products. Most of the editing is done by simply moving different sliders back and forth until you reach the desired result. The program doesn't actually alter the original picture, it merely stores the settings you use to improve it and then allows you to export it with the changes made. You can even export directly to facebook, myspace etc. and even create new albums for facebook within this program. It doen't do everything that Photoshop does (like layers and masking), but if you simply want an easy way to organize your photos, improve the quality, and then export them, this program is really all you need. The editing features are extremely powerful.

You can download a free trial copy that you can use for a month to see if you like it. Also, version 3 is supposed to come out within a month, so you could then download that one free and end up with 2 months of free use.

For more info: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/