The Daring Librarian

I've been sharing my love for this one stop shop of graphic design goodness for five years now, you'd think they would put me on the payroll or at least fly me to New York, pick me up in a limo, and set me up in the Four Seasons - you know - a just for a casual office visit!  But, nahhh I just got some stickers & T-shirts to give away at conferences.  But hey, that's OK...because I love them anyway! Now they have amped up their Mobile App - check it out!   (**see my sponsorship & street cred pledge to you at the bottom)  The PicMonkey App - For iPhone & Android. Get Graphic! PicMonkey is a free website & App that does wonders with your digital photos in an easy peasy click it and save it kinda way.  PicMonkey is free but yes, I enjoy the Royale upgrade - and now it's better than ever! The graphic at the very top was done on the web version of the site and this one was done just on my phone. In this post I'm going to give a...

(A version of this post was published in NEA Today Magazine - 5 Super Geeky Tips -So honored to have been invited to write again for them! But here you get one tip extra!) Booya! As I mentioned in my last blog post 5 Ways to Reflect, & Not Regret, Teaching OR... Summer Thoughts for Fall Success , one of the BEST things about being a teacher is that every year is a do-over! This post will provide some easy tips and examples of how up your ed tech game and get ready for a super new school year. Don’t feel pressured to do all 6 - just pick one for this year! If that works out for you, try another and go on from there.  1. Get Cloudy    Goodbye flash drives and external drives - the future of data storage and hosting is in the cloud. At first, I was skeptical of the cloud (and a little scared) but 5 years later and using it every day - I’m convinced! Most school systems have some version of Google Apps for Education (GAfE), available for teachers; I recomm...

Happy New Year!  It's that time of year that I do my Geeky house cleaning, so it's another year going over my past posts about this topic and thinking how to improve them! At first I thought I could leave out the password comic & tip and then the Sony thing happened. WTHeck!? It was recently released that some Sony employees had a password of s0ny123 and the worst, "password!" Also, with brute force hacking making the rounds, I decided to update a few of my tips. "The only person you can rely on to keep your password secure is yourself. And let me tell you, you're probably not doing enough to keep number one safe. The reason: Your special lump of letters, numbers, and symbols are likely spread over too many sites, are not long enough, and are probably too personal. Most of our passwords suck. And it's kind of a big problem." - Gizmodo   1. Craft a Perfect Password & Dump Your Cache OK, so there IS no perfect!...

I was going to update this post from last year & add some new stuffs for 2013 because this IS the time of year that I do try to do my Geeky housecleaning. But dag...this post holds up! So..being sorta lazy anyway I'm going to re-post it with new commentary! (click above for a larger size or download PDF it here ) 1. Change your passwords. Yes, ALL of them.   According to CNN Tech an 8 digit password can be hacked in 2 hours but a 12 character password would take 17 years. Use this handy Comic Tutorial to create a really super new password for every website....don't worry, there's a trick!  You don't have to go to every site you use right away - just make a commitment that when you do go to a site that requires your password you take the extra 5 min to change your password - maybe using the suggestions in my Comic Tutorial. Basically, have a root password, a varying numeric addition (not the year or your B-DAY!) and add an ending that has something to do wit...