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Living near Seattle during COVID-19 has been… interesting. While as of this writing, my college is open for face-to-face courses, our college president wrote, in part, “In accordance with King County Department of Public Health  guidance, we encourage supervisors to provide telework options to employees whose job duties can be performed remotely without hampering operations or instruction.” This means that faculty have the option to continue to meet their classes on campus or to take their instruction online. “Online” means either an asynchronous course—think of your typical online course—or through some sort of synchronous webconferencing, such as Zoom or Bb Collaborate, or synchronous webcasting, suchRead More →

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Last week, after a student confessed to using a “study guide” site to complete one or more of her homework assignments, I did some Googling. While I think I found what she was using—the words and phrases were changed up—I discovered that another of my students was using the answers in their entirety. That led to more searching. Here are two sites that a few of my students are using. CourseHero.com First, let’s find your college or university. In the top navigation bar, click on “Find Study Resources” and search “by School”—K-12 or higher ed. For my college, here are the “Popular Departments.” Under eachRead More →

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My college is on quarters, so it’s time once again for me to reset the due dates on my courses in preparation for spring quarter. I organize my class schedule by weeks, so it’s helpful for me to know what week it is in the quarter—both when I’m setting my due dates for the upcoming quarter, and when we’re in the middle of a quarter. When I do this at home, I write the week numbers on a paper calendar to help me with scheduling. Today I was working on it in my office where I don’t have a paper calendar. I thought, “Hmmm… IRead More →

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USB condoms Let’s start with USB condoms, because, frankly, that’s why you decided to read this post. It’s okay to be honest. We’re friends. The cable you use to charge your phone and your tablet serve as both a power cable and a data cable. Electricity and information both flow through this same cable. As long as you are home, you are safe. When you venture out into public, however… Let’s say you’re at the airport and you’d like to top off your phone’s battery before boarding your plane. You plug your USB cable into one of those now-ubiquitous charging stations. Unfortunately, someone with nefariousRead More →

Logs for Word Counter Plus and Word Count

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For the discussions in my online courses, I have added an expected minimum word count to help students better gauge what is expected of them. Each initial post has three sections, and each has a different word count minimum. Same with the discussion responses. I am certainly not going to count the words myself. And it seems silly to copy and paste each discussion post into Word to get a word count. Instead, I added a word count tool to my browser. In Chrome, I use Word Counter Plus. In Firefox, I use Word Count. While both look a little different, they work exactly theRead More →

Chrome logo

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For those of us who like to—or least tend to—have a lot of browser tabs open at once, Chrome’s new “tab groups” along with the previous ability to pin tabs can help bring order to the chaos. Below, you can see what I currently have open in Chrome. The six tabs on the left are “pinned.” These are tabs that I frequently use, so I’ve pinned them. I have easy access to them without them taking up so much real estate. To pin a tab, right-click on it, and select “Pin”. [Extra credit: how many of my pinned tabs can you identify based on theirRead More →

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My college has been with the Canvas learning management system for a few years now. There are many things I like about it, but the cumbersome number of clicks it takes to delete a bunch of pages is not one of them. And I wanted to delete a bunch of pages. We recently turned on “Atomic Search” within Canvas that allows instructors and students to search within a course. If a page is published, it’s fair game to be returned in search results. As I copied courses from quarter to quarter to quarter, I never had to worry about those unused pages. They weren’t linkedRead More →

Book cover

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Several years ago, I moved away from using presentation slides in my courses. They just didn’t work with the interteaching model I had started using. Instead, I returned to where I started my career: writing on the board. My current board is digital (interactive short-throw projector with whiteboard software), so my “markers” never run out of ink. For my conference presentations –except for my tech talks—I still use presentation slides, specifically PowerPoint. I know some of you really love Prezi. As my colleague Steve Chew has observed, Prezi is the only presentation software that requires the audience to take Dramamine first. I’ll attend your PreziRead More →

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Some instructors and students like to use a Jeopardy! format to review course content. I’ve learned that it’s not my thing, but I’m happy to support those of you who are into it. First, you need a Jeopardy! board. I wrote about Jeopardy Labs in 2011, and that is still a solid board creation tool. Next, you need a way for students to buzz in. The easiest is the free BuzzIn.live website. (Shout out to the developer, Logan Sinclair!) Visit the BuzzIn.live website and click the “Host” button. That brings up your host dashboard. Tell your students to use their web-enabled device to visit theRead More →

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Each of us sees color differently. Download the free Color Blind Pal app to your phone or tablet. Open the app, tap “inspecting color” to change it to “filtering colors,” then tap the at the top of the screen. If it is difficult for you to see the color differences in the pie chart below, under “color blindness type” select your form of color blindness and click the ← at the top of the screen. Point your camera at this pie chart to see the colors shifted making the colors easier to tell apart.         If you have typical color vision, underRead More →