Change ALL CAPS to lowercase

A very useful tip:

Have you ever been worming on something on the computer, only to look up and realize that you accidentally hit to Caps-Lock button? Sometimes if you’re lucky and catch it after only about 2 or 3 words. In a worst case scenario however, you may have already typed 3 for 4, or even more sentences before noticing. Now you have to go back and retype everything right? Wrong! There are some windows applications that have shortcuts to automatically do this. There are also web applications that will convert text as well.

In Microsoft Word (I’ve heard Excel can do this too) all you have to do is highlight the words you want to change and hit Shift + F3. This will convert everything to lower case. Hitting it again will capitalize the first letter of the words.

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We've had success using this in Word and Outlook.

Google Filters Websites by Reading Level

Since December 10th 2010 Google now allows users to filter websites by reading levels in three categories; beginner, intermediate, and advanced. In addition to filtering, users can annotate the search results with reading levels.

The new feature is available by going to advanced search and selecting an option from the "reading level" under drop down. Selecting the "annotation" option will annotate each result with what Google think the reading level is and includes a distrubtion graph at the top of the results page.

New Tool for Word Searching via Google Books

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

A team from Harvard has teamed up with Google to crack the spines of 5,195,769 digitized books that span five centuries of the printed word with the hopes of giving the humanities a more quantitative research tool.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer, launched online December 16.

-Scientific American

A more thorough review of Google/Harvard's new tool by New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html

Today In Data Loss

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Need to resize an image quickly?

Resizeimage.org, may be for you. You can quickly increase or decrease an image size using this free tool – all you need is the image file and a connection to the internet. Save the file, after re-sized and you can upload it as a new Blackboard icon or insert it in your documents.