Parts of the lower school and middle school building have gotten much worse during construction for cell phone connections. I don’t think it will change unless a more powerful signal is put in our area. 

One feature that can alleviate this problem is “Wi-Fi Calling.” Some phones have the capability to use your Wi-Fi connection to help get your cell phone to connect for calls and text messages. 

This article explains more about the concept and gives links to instructions for different cell service providers and compatible phone information. Thanks to @bradleychambers on Twitter for the information!
http://boundless.aerohive.com/experts/How-To-Use-Wi-Fi-To-Elimate-Cellular-Dead-Spots.html

If you have tried this feature in the past and it did not work, you may want to try again. The IT Director recently made some firewall changes necessary to support it. 

An iPhone 6 Plus on AT&T has been tested and connected successfully to the service. Tests on other carriers or models have not been done. 

Let the IT Director know if you have a Samsung phone and you are connecting it. He would like to see the settings for that. 

​P.S. When connected on an iPhone  you will see the “Wi-Fi” letters in the upper left hand corner of your device. 

If you receive a Microsoft Word document as an attachment, you may have noticed that it opens in the funky "Reading Mode" by default. Many users prefer to see it in the regular "Print Layout".

One quick way to change it is to click on the "Print Layout" button in the bottom right toolbar, next to the zoom slider. 

If you would like to change the default so that a Word attachment always opens in "Print Layout" then follow these steps:

• In Word, click on  the FILE menu and then choose OPTIONS. 
  
• You will already be in the GENERAL section of the options.
  
• At the bottom of the window, look for "Open e-mail attachments and other uneditable files in reading view."
  
• Un-check that box next to this item and click on OK.

A link to a great tutorial on setting up the Guided Access feature on a student iPad including the time limit function:
http://youtu.be/9x9NeSbEKOE

As noted by @cjdelbalso , there is also an option for disabling a specific area of the screen: 
"One feature that is not shown in the video is the function to disable specific areas on the screen. When you are in the main guided access menu, simply use your finger to draw a box or circle around the area you want to disable. This feature is very helpful if your kids are using an app that has ads or buttons you don’t want them to click on."

This feature is highly recommended for younger students whenever they use your class iPads. 

by Joel Dittmer (@jdgeek)

Happy New Year!

I took some time over the holidays to update my digital photo and video backup for 2014. Since the year was now over and the last New Year's Eve party picture was taken, it was time to get organized and, more importantly, make sure my backup was in place. 

The goal for a good backup is to make sure the important data is in more than one place and that these multiple locations are NOT under the same roof! For the purposes of this blog post, I will focus on digital pictures and not my entire backup strategy!

Many pictures that I want to save come from my camera. Some pictures will come from other people that I will copy to my computer - through SD cards, downloads, or if they send me a picture in an email. So I have two needs - getting pictures off of my phone to my computer and organizing the photos that are now on my computer.

I move pictures that are in the camera roll on my iPhone by using the "Camera Backup" feature in the OneDrive app. In DropBox, it is called "Camera Upload". The basic idea is that, by opening these apps, they will automatically access your phone's camera roll and upload the new pictures to an online storage location inside of an existing OneDrive or Dropbox account. This process is easier if you have OneDrive or Dropbox installed on your computer, because then the pictures will sync to this computer for the next step.

Instructions for setting up "Camera Backup or Camera Upload":
https://www.dropbox.com/help/307
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/ios-faq

Keep in mind that if you have a limited amount of storage on your DropBox or OneDrive account, you may hit a limit. Note that the FREE storage given by Dropbox is 2 GB, but Microsoft offers 15 GB free in OneDrive. 

My next step is to organize! I like to create folders that have pictures from certain days and events in them. For my New Year's Eve party, I created a folder on my desktop called "2014-12-31 New Years Eve" and put all the pictures I had in it. I pulled these pictures from my Camera Backup folder, the email I received from my friend, and by copying pictures off of my Mom's camera!

Once all my folders are organized on my desktop, I then upload them to a cloud storage location. I use Google Drive for my pictures. I could easily use OneDrive or Dropbox for this as well, but I have an existing system that is still working for me, so I put all my pictures there. I currently pay $2.99/month for 100 GB of storage in Google Drive. My photo/video collection is about 80 GB in size. 

Now the ruthless part!! I go back to both my iPhone Camera Roll and my "Camera Backup" folder in OneDrive and DELETE the pictures that I have uploaded and backed up. Why? Otherwise these locations will quickly become unmanageable if they are filled with hundreds or thousands of pictures. Bad things happen when I run out of storage space on my phone and the iCloud backup of my phone. 

The process I have described so far I actually do actually every few weeks, or any time I take a significant number of pictures at a certain event. The longer I wait, the harder it is to get organized. 

The one extra task I do at the end of the year is copy my entire 2014 picture collection to an external hard drive. That way may pictures are both in the cloud (on Google Drive) and on an external hard drive. The external hard drive has my entire picture collection on it from previous years as well. When I am done copying, I UNPLUG that external hard drive and put it in my closet.

Technically, I have one other step, but that is just because I tend to go way overboard on backing up. I also keep a copy of pictures on my desktop computer at home for easy access for projects. This computer is also backed up using Carbonite. But I don't consider this my primary backup for pictures and video. 

So that is my life! It gives me a good feeling to know that my pictures are safe in more than one place and my phone is not filling up! I am ready to take on the new year! What is your backup strategy? Let me know on Twitter - @jdgeek - or emailing me at help@popcs.org. 

www.popcshelp.org/studentsTwo sections of the new POPCS Help website are now updated with content. Check out the Student page for tutorials on the most important apps and resources used by POPCS students. The Staff page now has information about accessing email and setting it up on your iOS device.

www.popcshelp.org/staff
www.popcshelp.org/students

Mr. CJ DelBalso, Director of Innovative Teaching and Learning at Prince of Peace Christian School, has started a new series on his blog entitled "Developing Children Who Are Responsible Technology Users." 

Check out part 1 on the newest entry on his blog at The Refinery of Life.