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We are leaving in a couple days to visit my father-in-law. I want to work while on this trip, including getting my online courses ready for the fall*. Now that I routinely work with three monitors, the thought of trying to ready my courses with only my Windows laptop monitor made me a little twitchy. I travel with a small Android tablet, so surely there must be an easy way to extend my Windows laptop to that tablet as a second screen – easier that the software I used a few years ago. And there is. Spacedesk is free. Your Windows computer will be yourRead More →

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Have you had this experience? You’re reading a student’s paper, and your internal plagiarism detector starts setting off alarms. The prose sounds different than anything else the student has written. You start googling phrases – and nothing comes up. Using Turnitin? That probably won’t catch it either (Rogerson & McCarthy, 2017). Your student may have used one of the many freely available “paraphrasing tools.” Here is the first paragraph from a recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, andRead More →

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It didn’t take long. I found a replacement for Beanote, the Chrome extension I wrote about in my last blog post. Hypothes.is has more power and more flexibility. Add to any webpage a personal note just for yourself, a note for your group, or a public note that can be seen by anyone running Hypothes.is Several of us at my college are working on editing pages that explain to faculty how to get a video captioned. Using Hypothes.is we can leave notes on each webpage that everyone else in our group can see. This is much easier than taking screenshots and emailing them to eachRead More →

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Sometimes I want to add a note to a webpage. Beanote is a Chrome browser extension that will let me do that. When I give my tech tools presentation, I discuss LastPass, for example. I don’t always remember all of the LastPass features I want to talk about, so I’m going to add a Beanote “sticker note” listing those features on the LastPass homepage. Anytime I visit that page with my Chrome browser, that note will be there. I’ve highlighted the sentence “LastPass remembers all your passwords, so you don’t have to.” You can see the 3-icon Beanote toolbar. The first icon is a highlighter.Read More →

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NOTE May 22, 2019: QBBuzzer appears to be no more. Instead, use BuzzIn.Live. Just as free and even easier to use.  ********************* Yesterday a colleague sent an email to our faculty asking if anyone had buzzers she could borrow for a Jeopardy-like review she was doing in her class. I thought that there must surely be a digital solution. QBBuzzer is about as easy to use as you can imagine. Visit the QBBuzzer website and choose a name for your “room.” This is what your students will type to get into your room. Keep it simple. (Room names are not case sensitive; spaces are permitted.) ChooseRead More →

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One of my favorite conference activities is attending poster sessions. I especially love hearing from undergraduates about their research. The topic isn’t even that important to me. In fact, the less I know about the topic, the more fun it is for me to listen and the more questions I get to ask. “Wait. I’m not familiar with that construct. Can you explain what that is?” While I enjoy posters, it pains me to see conference attendees carrying around tubes, wrestling with getting posters in and out of tubes, and forgetting tubes in airplane overhead bins. Fabric posters have been around for a while. TheseRead More →

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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 →