More On Printing

Teachers at Wawaloam use Pearson SuccessNet resources. SuccessNet has videos which are solid resources for teachers and students. Unfortunately, Pearson embeds the SuccessNet videos inside PDF files. (Seriously, why build that proprietary hurdle, Pearson? Why?)

In order to view the SuccessNet videos, IT installed Adobe Reader on many Wawaloam teachers' laptops. With the Adobe Reader installed, SuccessNet videos play well. A big problem is, the Adobe Acrobat Reader installation disables Chrome's ability to display PDF files natively. That's a problem for EWG teachers who want to print PDF files to a school printer.

There is, however, an easy way to toggle how your Macbook - and Chrome - handle PDF files. Simply put, when you want to print your PDFs to a school printer, you enable Chrome's default PDF viewer. And, when you want to play a Reading Street video, you disable Chrome's default PDF viewer.

Don't panic. The straightforward process of toggling between the two modes is outlined in the video below.

Once you set Chrome to use its built in, default viewer, you can send PDFs directly to SharpFindMe via Cloudprint. If you're not sure how to do that, there is a brief video that demonstrates printing PDFs in EWG that was included in a recent post.

Still stuck? Please contact me.

How Large Is That Font?

At Wawaloam, a teacher tried to print a list of sight words using a serif type face at 300 points to Sharp Find Me. The prints were mangled and or blank. Through some trial and error, we discovered the maximum type size Sharp Find Me can handle. The magic number is 231. Anything bigger prints as a blank. Who knew? If you want to print larger than 231 points to Sharp Find Me, you can take a screenshot of the word, scale the image, then print the image. Cumbersome, but doable. Or, print to a different printer such as a home inkjet.

EWG's Cloud Printing Revisited

In a post last year, I described a tedious method to print word documents and other local files to EWG's cloud printers using an application called CloudPrint. During the last year, the CloudPrint application moved from 'free' to $1.99. Users balked. While the CloudPrint app *could* be side loaded to circumvent the expense, I had a hard time reconciling side loading with ISTE-T standard 4a.

The video below shows you how to CloudPrint from word or any other local application on your Mac sans CloudPrint. The solution is simple, fast, and easy. I wish I had thought of it last year.