Meet My New Friend Zamzar

Yesterday my book group discussed Stones into Schools by Greg Mortensen. It's the sequel to Three Cups of Tea and tells the unbelievable saga of building schools primarily for girls in extremely rural and impoverished areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those girls are thrilled to have a roof and a pencil and with those simple items are bringing change to their world.

What would those girls think of my most recent 24 hours?
---What magic transports pictures and fun messages to my telephone?
---How can I read a 300 page book on a screen on a 4" x 6" piece of metal?
---How can the clerk at the store magically put money back in my account by waving a gun-like device over some marks on my receipt?
---How can I watch a TV show, fast-forwarding through the commercials and backing up when I don't understand a phrase?

What would those girls think of the day I just spent almost entirely in front of my computer.
---First was figuring out how to re-order and delete items from my bookmarks. No more wasted moments while scrolling to the end of the list to get to Facebook in order to achieve plenty of wasted moments looking at Facebook.
---On to my new best friend, Zamzar. ALL BY MYSELF I figured out how to access video files, convert them, download them to my computer, file them where I can find them, and imbed them into Power Point presentations. Man, I was proud of myself!
---Not content to be just a blogger, my text task was to explore glogster. Yes, I have made a glog! A few short years ago, my students happily made projects describing themselves using---gasp!---poster board and markers! On a glog, one can make a virtual poster with a choice of numerous background designs, numerous interesting "balloons" in which to write information, numerous decorative items that jump up and down or blink on and off, buttons to click to link to a blog or website, ways to import pictures and photographs, and buttons to play what you recorded. My glog isn't half bad....I just could not figure out how to erase some advertising, so there's a giant hand pointing at a Christmas ad under my picture.
---Next I explored Wordle and Tugxedo. I struggled a long time with these cool programs before realizing they just weren't going to work on a Mac. What fun I'll have, however, if Ken allows me access to his PC. How have we ever lived without being able to get a visual representation of words in a text?--the words used more often are physically larger than those used less frequently and the words are grouped in various interesting shapes.

So, today I explored three ideas out of the dozens of new ideas presented at a technology workshop I recently attended. I didn't do more than some minimal things around the house and, except for going to water aerobics, didn't leave the kitchen table all day.

I'm delighted to feel less like a dinosaur after my technology day and I know we're not going to go back to the pencils and simple schools of Afghanistan....but, Man!, that was a lot of time for just a small step forward into tech-land.