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If you’re teaching and attending committee meetings remotely, you’re spending some serious quality time with your headphones. I had never found earbuds that didn’t irritate my ears after an hour or so. Over-the-ear headphones make my ears hot, and the pressure on my head bugs me. A year ago, I bought bone conduction headphones, and I am thrilled with them. Bone conduction headphones sit in front of your ears and transmit sound, not through your ear canal, but through the bones of your skull. Here’s a blog post I wrote in a different forum on how bone conduction headphones work. They take a little bitRead More →

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Faculty seem to always be thinking about the best way to communicate with our students. While most academics still live inside of our email, most of our students do not. Some instructors use Remind or Slack to message their students, and both are good solutions. Both also require students to install an app on their device, and then a bit of instruction on how to use it. As we’re about to start a new quarter here in the Pacific Northwest—a quarter that will be entirely online—the question of how best to contact students has risen to greater importance. A special shout out to my colleagueRead More →

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As my colleagues at semester institutions are trying to finish out their terms and those of us on quarters are gearing up for the start of the spring term during this time of coronavirus online education, email management is more important than ever. Much more of our communication with colleagues will be through email. And, more importantly, the primary way—or, in some cases, the only way—students will have to contact us, their professors, is through email. That means that it is more important than ever that we practice good email hygiene: responding to what needs responses, deleting what needs deleted, filing what needs filing, andRead More →

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I first wrote about the YouCanBook.Me scheduling tool in 2010. YouCanBook.Me checks your web-based calendar to see when you are free, and then makes your free times schedulable by others, such as students. To access YouCanBook.Me’s full power, you need a pro account ($9/month, billed yearly). For what it can do, the money may be worth it to you. It was to me—until Office 365 Bookings. Recently, Microsoft developed a tool with similar functionality as part of its Office 365 suite. If you have Office 365, you have Bookings. Because Bookings and Outlook are in the same suite of tools, Bookings automatically has access toRead More →

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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 →