Dropbox

Dropbox also saves revisions of files. If you save your work regularly (or use auto-save), you can go back to an earlier version of the file. This can save you from wiping out your work in Word or even recover an accidently deleted file.

Dropbox also does file sharing. My wife and I also have Dropbox accounts and it was easy to set up one folder that’s shared with the entire family. Now when our daughter wants to show us something, instead of emailing it to us, she can just copy the file to the Family folder and we all get a copy on our computer. We also use it to copy files to the one computer that’s connected to the printer, since I haven’t gotten around to figuring out what’s wrong with the printer sharing on our network.

Dropbox can also share files online. By default, all your files are private and encrypted. But if you copy a file to your Public folder, you can right-click on the file and copy a web site link to that file.

Dropbox comes with a free 2 gigabytes of storage. You can upgrade to a paid account to get 50 or 100 gigabytes. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes for free.

Most chess books are aimed at the experienced player. Even the childish-looking How to Beat Your Dad at Chess is beyond beginning players. I’ve found three books that are excellent for teaching younger players: Chess for Children, Better Chess for Young Players, and Batsford Chess Course. The Chess For Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess are also decent comprehensive books. Books by Susan Polgar, a female grandmaster, would be excellent for girls.

There are many excellent chess websites that offer articles, puzzles, and ways to play real opponents. One exceptional one for learning is ChessTempo, which dynamically rates players and puzzles so the player is offered puzzles at the appropriate difficulty. A bonus for kids is that you can see your score rise (or fall) as you work, so they continually get feedback on their efforts and can stay motivated to beat the scores of friends and family.

A great free chess tool is Winboard (and the bundled Crafty chess “engine”).  Whenever you can’t understand where a game went wrong, playing through the game with analysis turned on is a tremendous help.

This week’s theme over at Teachnology is handwriting. There is a video for lefties, and tons of resources for making your own practice sheets. Check out the whole unit here.

Teachnology is a fantastic resource for homeschoolers and supplemental work. Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of Aby Arabit.

The goal of the game is to move a given object into the goal, a designated box. The object starts in a workspace where you build your contraption.

There are just so many different possible solutions that we’ve had great fun comparing ours. It is very important not to look ahead. After you’ve solved a puzzle, you will have the opportunity to view many different solutions from other users and rate them! This is much less frustrating than working the problems, and has proven to be quite humbling.

This is a great experiential site if you’ve been working with building Lego machines and although this is a completely 2-D activity, much can be learned about the gears, force, gravity, tension, friction, structure, and creative problem solving.

This game is addictive. Consider yourself warned.

http://www.addictinggames.com/fantasticcontraption.html