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Recently, I gave a presentation on academic technology at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development at Xavier University of Louisiana. One of my favorite tools to show is Mendeley, a pdf manager with a very nifty MS Word interface for references (see this blog post). During my presentation, I created a Word document, entered some in-text citations via Mendeley, and then clicked “Insert Bibliography,” and like magic, the full list of references for all of those in-text citations appeared. And then I showed how you can quickly switch from, say, APA style to Chicago and back again. A sharp-eyed participant (whoRead More →

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I was honored earlier this month to be a guest on a podcast on teaching hosted by Elizabeth Yost Hammer, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development (CAT+FD) at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA). The topic was – no surprise – technology for teaching and learning. When you have 40 minutes to kill, give it a listen. Elizabeth and I have been friends for years, and she knows that I read a lot of non-fiction. The podcast ends with Elizabeth asking about my three favorite books from 2017. Because of time limitations, I was limited to three – although IRead More →

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When we moved from standing in the library making Xerox copies of journal articles to downloading pdfs from a database, it seemed like an awesome development. Until we realized that marking up pdfs digitally is not easy. I would not be surprised if you told me that you print your pdfs. Here I will show you Mendeley Desktop for Windows. There are also desktop versions for Mac and Linux. Mendeley’s web interface will keep all of your content synched across your computers. What does Mendeley do? Indexing Pdfs live on your computer wherever you want them to live. Mendeley acts as an indexer. Drag andRead More →

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This functionality is now native to Canvas. ************ After I copy my current course into my Canvas course shell for next term, I have to adjust all of the due dates. Going into each assignment and changing the date is tedious. And if you’ve been reading my blog, you know I hate tedium. Why can’t I see all of the due dates on one page and change them there? Here is a big time shout out to James Jones of Richland Community College for creating a mechanism that does just that. [And a shout out to Marc Lentini of Highline College for pointing me toRead More →

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When presenting, I sometimes want to show something on my screen that is small. In Chrome, I can zoom in with CTRL + [plus sign], zoom out with CTRL + [minus sign], and return to normal with CTRL + [zero]. If it’s text I’m showing in Word, I can zoom in using the zoom slider in the bottom right corner. If I want to show, say, the Word toolbar ribbon, I have to use something else to magnify it. This is also for anyone who has said something like, “I know you can’t read what’s on this PowerPoint slide, but…” Windows Magnifier is likely alreadyRead More →

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The fall 2017 Windows 10 update brings with it an emoji menu, and it’s only accessible via a keyboard shortcut. Windows key (WIN) + semicolon or WIN + period will call it up. Click on the emoji you want to select it. Click on the magnifying glass to search. Click on the other menu icons to browse by category. The clock icon will initially show seemingly randomly selected emoji – and they very well may be. Once you start using them, this menu will show your most recently used emoji. On the people tab, there is a little box in the upper right corner. ClickRead More →

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We have been talking a lot at my college about accessibility. Are our videos captioned? Do our webpages and document images have alt-text that can be read by screen readers? In that vein, I have been thinking about OCR – optical character recognition. Here is an image. It’s just a quick screenshot of text from a previous blog post. I added some alt-text to the image. A screen reader would come to this image and read the alt-text. For the curious, the alt-text is “Image of text from a previous blog post,” and you may even be able to read that text by mousing overRead More →

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In Windows, the built-in clipboard can only hold one item. That means the next time you copy a chunk of text, the previous chunk of text that you had copied is erased. When grading assignments, I find that what I write for one student often applies to other students. I know that some of you handle this by having, say, a Word file that holds all of your common comments. But what if I told you that there is an easier (and free!) way? Ditto saves the last 500 (or however many you want) instances of whatever you’ve copied, such as text, images, files. IRead More →

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I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts – any shortcuts, really. I want to spend less time running my computer and more time doing what needs to get done. For Windows users, hold down the Windows key and press S. Your cursor will jump down to the Windows search box. Type in what you’re looking for, and you’re in business. MaxLauncher ups your search and launch game. Use a keyboard shortcut to run MaxLauncher (I use CTRL – ‘), and then press a key on your keyboard to run a program, open a folder, or open a file. I have my programs on the firstRead More →

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I go through a lot of half-sheets of paper in my courses. On one side, students write what they found interesting in that day’s class and what questions they have about the course material. On the other side are instructions for small group discussion. I’ve been using some version of these forms for a couple years now, but they seem to be in a constant state of flux. That means frequent revisions. That’s fine. That means I type up what I want at the top of the page and then I copy and paste it underneath. Then I put my cursor between the two versionsRead More →