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For those of you who have taken the Dropbox plunge, if you signed up with your edu email account Dropbox wants to double the space you get from referrals. That’s now 500MB per referral. And it’s retroactive. That’s right. They’ll double the extra space you’ve already received from referrals. Just visit this webpage and confirm your email address. Your space will be automatically increased. If you’re not a Dropbox user, it’s time to sign up. Not familiar with Dropbox? See this earlier blog post. How do you get space for referrals? Log into your Dropbox.com account, and click on the “Referral Status” tab. At theRead More →

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I had a student come by my office yesterday. She has a website where she’d like to have a discussion board for her visitors to use. I knew that there must be some discussion board services out there that will give you html code so that you can embed the board on your website. Of course I couldn’t recommend something without trying it out myself. I decided to go with Nabble.com. In the navigation bar at the top of this blog click on the new discussion board link to see it in action. The discussion board is for you to post questions and suggestions. IRead More →

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My readers know that I’m a big fan of YouCanBook.Me (see this post). In fact YouCanBook.Me has some new functionality since I last wrote about it, which means I owe you another post on that tool. In short, YouCanBook.Me gives others the power to schedule themselves into your calendar. Some of you let me know that you don’t want to give students that kind of power. For you, Doodle has a new tool. You may already be familiar with Doodle (see this post) because you’ve used it to get a bunch of people to agree on a time to meet or to vote on someRead More →

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As many of you know, I’ve been a fan of Delicious social bookmarks for quite a while. (See this post from two years ago.) Its future came into question recently when Yahoo, who bought Delicious in 2004, decided to yank the staff it had devoted to it. The blogosphere exploded with the suggestions for other social bookmarking sites. I had tried some of those sites before, others I hadn’t heard of. After dancing amongst them, I decided that Delicious was the best choice for me, so I decided to ride it out and see what happened. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I received this emailRead More →

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[UPDATE 10/9/2012   : Tegrity now has dual-monitor support for both Macs and PCs.  When you run the Tegrity recorder, if Tegrity detects more than one monitor, it will ask if you’d like to record the current monitor.  If you want to record the other one, click the blue arrow to change monitors.  Very easy!] Bear with me while I digress from my normal postings. Typically I discuss technology that is freely available to most or about technology that many already have, such as Microsoft Office. This time I’m going to discuss an issue that I spent quite a bit of time working on before hittingRead More →

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As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Dropbox (see this earlier post). Dropbox adds a new folder to your ‘My Documents’ folder called ‘My Dropbox.’ Let’s say that you’ve created a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Important Committee.’ Inside that folder are several other folders. Let’s say one of them is called ‘Stuff to Share.’ You want to share this folder with your fellow committee members for coordinating the work of your committee. But you don’t want to move your entire committee folder to Dropbox, and you don’t want to pull that one subfolder out; you like to keep your files neatlyRead More →

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In December 2010 I wrote a post about Corkboard, a virtual bulletin board. They just announced some new features. You’re welcome to play around with this live board. If you have frequently-changing content for your students, it would be easy enough to embed a corkboard in your website or course management system (CMS), and just update the sticky notes as needed. No need to edit your website or CMS. Have other uses for it? Leave a comment!Read More →

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I’m a Firefox user, mostly because of the add-ons. These are my favorites. Colorful Tabs. I typically have 5-10 tabs open at one time. Having them colorized help me pick them out quickly. The tab I’m currently on is brighter than the others and the page title is bolded. The add-on comes with the ability to customize in many different ways. For example, you can have Colorful Tabs generate colors at random, but you can also specify certain colors for certain domains. For example, my Google Reader tab is always aqua. Delicious Bookmarks. As a Delicious user I’m frequently bookmarking interesting websites. With this add-on,Read More →

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I’ve been a big proponent of Google calendar as a personal calendar clearinghouse, and I’m also a fan of Doodle for finding a time when everyone can get together for a meeting. While you can enter all of your free times in by hand when creating your Doodle poll, you can also let Doodle pull in your Google calendar and identify the free times for you. Go to Doodle.com. At the bottom of the page, click “Google Calendar.” On the next page, click “Connect with Google.” Doodle will ask you to log in. If you don’t already have a Doodle.com account (free), you’ll need toRead More →

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Whatever your motivation, switching from grading by hand to grading electronically may take a little extra time until you get down a system that works for you, but it’s worth it. Students use less paper. I write more comments since they’re not constrained by margin size, and my comments are legible. Having electronic copies of student work is handy when a year or two later a student asks for a letter of recommendation.  Students submit assignments. Decide if you want files sent in a particular file format. MS Word can handle most formats, but if you want to be cautious accept just doc, docx, andRead More →