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The theme for the last week on this blog has been email management. This morning I ran across a LifeHacker blog post that was talking about the same thing. See “Top 10 Tricks for Dealing with Email Overload.” That post reminded me that I’ve been wanting to show you how to turn off Outlook 2010 email notifications – that little popup box that appears in the lower right corner of your screen when a new email comes in. If you’re like my colleague Deb M., you are able to completely tune it out and ignore it. If you’re like me, you see it, and ifRead More →

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UPDATED 5/17/2014 Videodropper is now Orchard, which is nothing like Videodropper.  If you’re looking for a video downloader, check out KeepVid.  This blog post explains how it works. UPDATED 6/24/2012 A visit to the videodropper.ep.io website shows that the service is no longer available.  It has been replaced with a mysterious message. “We’re working on something new. Want to be the first to hear?” with a place to enter an email address to get updates.   UPDATED 10/13/2011. My sincerest thanks to the developer for posting his comment below.  I tried the service again this morning, and it worked perfectly.  Dropbox even downloaded it to myRead More →

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Quick Tech Tip. Tired of guessing which way your USB cable needs to be inserted? Look for the logo. That way is up. For those of us who have to squint to see the logo, add a little white out or nail polish to the top side. Never guess again. (Thanks to Lifehacker for the suggestions from Royce Eddington and one of the LifeHacker readers.) *The frowny-face in the USB cable image wasn’t intentional.Read More →

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I’ve left Firefox. It was using up a massive amount of RAM (Firefox 6) and had slowed to a crawl. I started looking at my add-ons to see what might be slowing it down as I did with previous iterations of Firefox. And then I stopped. I thought, “Using a web browser shouldn’t be this hard.” I had tried Chrome before, but I had Firefox set up exactly as I wanted with the add-ons that I wanted. Then the scales tipped. I didn’t have many add-ons left that worked, and Chrome had many more add-ons available. I’ve been happily, and speedily, cruising the web withRead More →

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Feeling harried?  The latest edition of Faculty Focus encourages you to take back your time. We know that humans don’t multitask.  Instead, we switch from one task to another, and in the process we lose time during that switch as we try to refocus.  The author suggests scheduling “like with like”.  Do similar tasks together to minimize losing time to refocus. The author also suggests scheduling your tasks.  Block time off in your calendar to get stuff done.  During that time, focus on that task.  Sometimes we get so caught up in being available for our students we forget to take care of ourselves. It’sRead More →

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Today’s Faculty Focus article is on using mind maps to get students to engage with the course material. While the author recommends using a large sheet of a paper, I would ask faculty to consider pointing their students to SpiderScribe.net. Earlier this year I wrote about SpiderScribe. (See this blog post.) It has a very short learning curve, and with the ability to include text, images, URLs, and documents, the maps that students create could be very powerful study aids. Using the share feature, students could work in pairs or groups to create the maps. No need to print them off. Students can add theirRead More →

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“Ellen Finkelstein invites you to join this free webinar series to learn how to eliminate Death by PowerPoint and make your presentations come to life. Listen to guest experts share their best techniques and answer your questions!” There will be seven sessions on Wednesdays at 11am PT/2pm ET beginning tomorrow, September 6, 2011 and running through October 26th (no session on September 21st). Visit the PowerPoint blog to see the list of speakers.  Or visit the OutstandingPresentationsWorkshops.com website. Register here. Hope to see you there!Read More →

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Of all the tech tools I’ve written about, there’s one that garners the most praise from my readers: YouCanBook.Me. There are three faculty members on my campus that, whenever I see them, mention how much they love it. Last month I was at the American Psychological Association Convention, and one of the attendees was a reader of this blog. She told me how great she though this tool was, and that several faculty on her campus concurred. What makes it so great? It automates a task that otherwise requires several emails and a lot of time. Without YouCanBook.Me: Student: I’d like to make an appointmentRead More →

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Do you play Jeopardy in class as a test review? Jeopardy Labs makes it easy to create a web-based Jeopardy game. Here is one created for the “Biological Bases of Behavior” chapter in an Advanced Placement Psych class. In the opening screen, decide how many teams will be playing. You can choose up to 12. Click “Start” to bring up the board. Clicking “100” under “The Neuron” produces this question. Students buzz in by whatever method you’d like. After the team responds, click “Correct Response” to show the correct answer. At the bottom of the screen, click +/- to add/subtract points to the responding team’sRead More →