Stop Printing the Internet

Last weekend I got a new television (our old one died) just in time to watch some great NCAA basketball games. While watching one of the games on Saturday evening I saw a new Progressive Insurance commercial. The premise of the commercial is that Progressive can't prevent us from becoming our parents but can save us money on insurance. In the commercial there was a scene where we're told, "we don't need to print the Internet." The commercial made me chuckle and it inspired this blog post. 

How to Limit Paper and Ink Usage When You Print
There are some instances when we do need to print things. When those instances occur there are ways to reduce the amount of ink and paper you use. 

The easiest way to save paper is to simply make sure that you're only printing what you need. When the print dialogue box pops-up select a specific page or two to print rather than using the default "print all pages" found on most printers. 

Printliminator is a handy little bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Printliminator allows you to highlight a webpage and select only the elements which you wish to print. You can install Printliminator in seconds by just clicking and dragging it into your browser's toolbar.

How to Encourage Students and Colleagues to Limit Printing

If your school uses Google Workspace, you can encourage your students and colleagues to limit their printing by using a couple of Google Docs features. The first is to add a watermark to your Google Documents that reads something like, "Only Print if Essential" or "Don't Print." Another option is to disable the option for collaborators to print Google Documents. 

Dan Russell Teaches Us How to Search for Audio Files

Dan Russell, whose book and other work I've referenced dozens of times on this blog, recently published a good lesson on how to find audio files. His post is not a lists of places to find audio files (I have a list of those here). Dan's blog post teaches readers how to locate specific sounds and podcasts. 

There are three parts to the lesson and each one is useful on its own.

• How to locate podcasts about a particular topic across multiple podcast platforms.
  
  
• How to search within the transcript of an audio recording. That part introduced me to a couple of new tools including this one for analyzing audio and video. 
  
  
• How to search for specific audio sounds like the bells of Notre Dame. 

Applications for Education

As more and more podcasts, and useful ones at that, are published they are going to become a good source of information for students to use as part of larger research projects. Knowing how to locate podcasts about a specific topic is going to become an important skill. Furthermore, being able to create transcripts and search within transcripts is a skill that will be important to students who create their own podcasts and videos. 

On a related note, here's a video that I made that shows you how to create a transcript of a YouTube video. 

Last Call - Webinar - How to Create & Sell Your Own Digital Products

This afternoon at 4pm ET I'm hosting a new webinar titled How to Create & Sell Your Own Digital Products. Register by 3pm to join me!

If you have ever thought about trying to create and sell things like an eBooks, lesson plans and teaching materials, or online courses, this webinar is for you!

In How to Create and Sell Your Own Digital Products you'll learn how to create eBooks, lesson materials, and online courses. In some ways creating the materials is the easy part. Selling is the harder part for many teachers. That's why during the webinar I'll show you how to sell your products without paying huge commission fees to online marketplaces.

  

Learn more and register here to join me for this live webinar at 4pm ET today!.