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In the years before the Internet, at the first college I worked at as faculty, the library had a table of contents service. You could tell them what journals you were interested in, and when a new print copy of the journal arrived, they would photocopy the table of contents and drop it into intracampus mail to you. If there were articles you wanted, you could highlight them on the table of contents copy and send it back to the library. The awesome library staff would photocopy the articles and send them to you, again, through intracampus mail. It was a fantastic service. And itRead More →

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There are many things I like about the Canvas learning management system. The inability to sort courses into folders is not one of them. In this blog post, we’ll use a built-in Canvas feature and a James Jones Tampermonkey script to do the next best thing. We’ll use course nicknames as a stand-in for folder names, and we’ll use the All Courses Sort Tampermonkey script to sort by nickname. Assigning nicknames to courses Nicknames are for your use only. Students, other instructors, observers, and anyone else in the course will not see them. Nicknames can only be assigned from the course card on the CanvasRead More →

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There are many reasons your technology may not be working. If you’ve cleared your web browser’s cache and rebooted, and your technology is still not working, sacrificing a digital goat to the tech gods may help. It certainly can’t hurt. As a service to the readers of this blog, I have provided a digital goat suitable for sacrifice. Visit this page and bookmark it. Sacrifice as often as needed.Read More →

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I want to know when content on certain webpages changes. For example, Zoom posts information about their software updates on their release notes page. If this were the 1990s, I wouldn’t mind popping over there every week or so to see if there was something new. But it’s 2022. I want someone to tell me when content has changed. Some newsfeed readers can handle the task, such as Inoreader, but I don’t find the process for setting it up particularly intuitive. Instead, let’s use a dedicated webpage monitoring service. I don’t have a lot of webpages I want to check for updates. In fact, theRead More →

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For all of you Google Drive fans and everyone else who is forced to use Google Drive against your will, take some time today to color code your folders. Perhaps you want to more easily see which Google Drive account you are in. You can make the first folder in your work account the color “pool” (light blue) and make the first folder in your personal Google Drive account “toy eggplant.” (Pool? Toy eggplant??). I suspect that someone who used to work for Crayola now works for Google. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the color-namer at Google is taking this opportunity toRead More →

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After receiving yet another campus-wide meeting invitation for an event in an ongoing series that I am never going to attend, I decided I was done manually processing these invitations. By manually processing, I mean, clicking “decline.” Every. Single. Time. Unfortunately, there is not a way (yet?) to tell Outlook to automatically decline meeting invitations from specific people or with specific words in the subject line, so we have to cobble together a few things to 1) delete the meeting invitation as soon as it arrives, 2) hide the unaccepted/undeclined meeting invitation from Outlook calendar, and 3) for those who synch their Outlook calendar withRead More →

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I’m back with another excellent James Jones Canvas Tampermonkey script (Jones’s full description). If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey installed in your web browser, visit the Tampermonkey website and click the first download button, not the beta version. What does the Autofill Maximum Rubric Ratings script do? Once installed, the script adds a Max button at the top of the rubric in the Pts cell. Clicking the Max button selects the maximum points cell for all of the criteria in your rubric. There are a couple ways you can use it. 1) Click Max to start with your rubric at maximum points, and then asRead More →

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Outlook notifications are the little popups that appear in the bottom right corner of your screen that scream “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!” There are a couple very good reasons to turn them off. First, every time they appear, what we are doing is interrupted. If we are in the middle of a thought, our attention goes to the notification, and then we need a few seconds to refocus on what we were doing to begin with. Every. @&%#$^. Time. Consider how many messages you receive in a day. Those seconds add up. The second very good reason to turn them off is if you happenRead More →

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As frequent readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of everyone who has the skill to create scripts that make Canvas better. This post will feature another James Jones script (thank you, James!). Like other scripts, this one uses the Tampermonkey add-on for your browser. If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey installed, visit the Tampermonkey website and click the first download button, not the beta version. What the “add color course border” script does Since all Canvas courses look the same, it can be hard to tell at first glance which course you are in. The “add color course border” script provides a handyRead More →

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Here are some handy features in the latest Canvas update. Some of these features needs to be turned on by your Canvas administrator. If you don’t see this feature in your instance of Canvas, ask your Canvas administrator to flip the switch. Apply score to ungraded While we’ve been able to mark all ungraded work with a default grade by clicking the 3-dot kebab icon for each Canvas gradebook entry, we now have the power to do that across the entire gradebook in one fell swoop. Click the 3-dot kebab icon next to Total in the Canvas gradebook. Use your new-found power only for good.Read More →