Dropbox.com provides you with 2GB free space out of the box. If other people who are invited by you join, Dropbox will increase your allotted space by either 500MB (edu accounts) or 250MB (everyone else) up to an additional 16GB for a total of 18GB. I was recently asked how exactly one gets that additional space.

1. Share a folder with someone who doesn’t have a Dropbox.com account yet. If they join Dropbox.com as a result of your invitation, more MBs for you.

   Or

2. Send your friends, family, and colleagues a link. Go to the Dropbox.com referrals page. Here you have a few options. Log into your web-based email service and get all your contacts so you can pick and choose who to send the link to. Or you can just enter the email addresses of your invitees directly. Or you can push your invitation out to Facebook or Twitter. Or, at the very bottom of the page, copy the link directly. Anyone who signs up via that link gets you extra space – and gets themselves extra space.

   

I bet you don’t schedule many appointments between 9pm and 8am. Yeah, me neither. Google Calendar now gives you the option to hide those hours, or whatever early/late hours you choose.

To activate the option, go to your Google Calendar, and click on the cog icon in the top right corner. Select “Labs”.

Click “enable” next to the “Hide morning and night” tool.

Click the “Save” button near the top of the page, and you’re done.

Go back to your calendar.

On the far left, where the times are listed, some of the times will be shaded. Click and hold the little bar at the bottom to select the morning times you’d like to hide.

Google Calendar will now look like this.

Then scroll down and repeat for the evening times. Done.

Any time you’d like to see those hours, just click on the shaded area in the time column. Click again to hide the hours.

What if you schedule something during those hidden times? Google Calendar will show you.

Thanks to the Lifehacker blog for the heads-up on this new tool!

My friends over at the Teaching High School Psychology blog, just posted about the 60 Minutes segment on the flavorists which they describe as “a nice piece on the flavor industry and their attempt to create ‘addictive flavors’ to woo consumers.”

If you use Chrome and want to show 60 Minutes episodes during class, go over to the Chrome web app store, and download the free 60 Minutes app. When you open a new tab in your Chrome browser, you’ll see the 60 Minutes icon.

Clicking the 60 Minutes icon calls up the most recent episode. The segments for the episode are on the left. Use the menu at the bottom of the screen to select previous segments.

Previous segments are divided into categories you see at the top of the screen in the screenshot below.

Click on the segment you want, and it will automatically start playing. Here I’ve selected the segment suggested by my colleagues. On the far right side, click the film icon to read about the segment. Click the + button right below it to view additional footage.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: TodaysMeet shut down on June 16, 2018. 

I just finished reading a Scientific American blog on how people watch television. The author reports that “TV networks have taken to dividing their audience into two new segments.” There are those who watch TV like people have always watched TV. And then there are those who watch with a web-enabled device in their hands. I’m not sure there’s much difference between those two groups in that both groups want to share the experience. If we have people in the home to watch with, we’ll do that. If our family and friends are scattered to the four winds, we’ll turn to the internet to connect with them – or to connect with strangers who love the show as much as we do. At root, we’re social creatures. Why wait until tomorrow morning at the water cooler to share our thoughts about the show when we can do it right now, in real time?

People are no different when you take them from in front of the TV and drop them into a classroom. If the class is even remotely engaging, students are going to want to say something to somebody. Some instructors encourage dialogue, others don’t, and don’t for a variety of reasons. Large class sizes certainly make dialogue more difficult, for example.

Some instructors encourage their students to use Twitter with a course-specific hashtag to ‘talk’ with each other during class. Earlier this year I wrote about backchan.nl as a way to create a walled-off space for you and your students. Here’s an even easier-to-use alternative. (Shout out to Steve J. of the Teaching High School Psychology blog!)

TodaysMeet is an impromptu meeting space. No logins required. Enter a name for your room. The URL will be http://todaysmeet.com/[whatever you name your room]. Decide how long you’d like the room to be available. Click “Create your Room.” Give your students the URL.

When a student enters, she or he enters a name, and clicks the “Join” button.

The student types comments in the “Message” box, and clicks “Say”. Comments from all students appear in the “Listen” area. Anyone who is in the room can see what everyone else has written.

At the end of class, you can save all of the comments as a PDF. Use it, if appropriate, as assessment data or to assign class participation credit. Respond to student comments or questions during the next class session or take them to your class discussion board or email list if you use one.

Want students to work in groups? Great! Have them huddle up to respond to some question, and then have someone enter something on the group’s behalf.

I’m often asked, “If students are looking at their devices, how do you know they’re doing something class-related?” I don’t, any more than I know that if they’re writing on paper, they’re taking notes and not working on their math homework. Or if they’re looking at me, they’re thinking about the course material, and not the great weekend they had or are planning.

Qwerty? 123456? Ashley? Bailey? SplashData has released the list of the top 25 passwords culled from lists produced by hackers. Is yours on the list? Password security is the best thing you can do to protect yourself.

I use LastPass to store all my passwords – one password to rule them all. It runs in my browser and on my Xoom and Android phone. If I remember that password, I have access to them all. It will also generate passwords for me if I’d like.

Don’t want to use a password manager? Be sure to create strong passwords that you will remember for the different websites you visit. Some people suggest using your favorite lyrics and mixing things up a bit. But don’t choose something popular. Hackers know enough to try those. Glen Campbell was recently honored at the CMA Awards, so let’s take a look at how some of his lyrics might look as passwords

Develop a system that is unique to you, and use it.

A little comic interlude.

From failblog.

[Update 6/20/2013: Sandglaz converted all of the grids to infinity grids.  This added a whole new complexity to Sandglaz that I don’t need, so I’m no longer using Sandglaz.)

I feel like I’m continually on a search for a good task management solution. I use FollowUp.cc to send reminders to myself via email. That works, but I’d really like something that works like paper. Sandglaz (sandglass, presumably) is the closest thing to that I’ve seen.

Here’s an example of what a to-do list looks like. (When you create a new account with Sandglaz, they’ll give you a grid of tasks that serves as a tutorial. Excellent idea!)

The section headers are the defaults, but you can change them to anything you’d like by clicking on them. To add another to-do item just click anywhere in that section. Click in the white space next to the checkbox, and start typing. See the little dots to the left of the check box? Click and hold to drag it. Drag it to change the order of tasks in that cell, drag it to another cell, or drag it to a completely different grid.

Mousing over an item gives you a down arrow on the right. Click it to add a description and a due date if you’d like. Click the “Delete Task” link to delete the task.

If you just want to acknowledge that you completed a task, click the task’s checkbox, and the task will receive a strike-through.

When you’re ready to delete all of your completed tasks, click “Delete Completed” at the top of the grid.

Want more than 4 cells in a grid? Click “Settings”.

That opens this window. Rename your grid, change the size, or delete it.

Sharing.

As with most tools in the cloud, you can share your grids with someone else. Click “Sharing” and invite whoever you’d like.

Advanced tools for the paid-for version.

[Updated 2/14/2012] Sandglaz is still in beta as of this writing, so the advanced tools are currently free, but they will likely only be available to paying users.

In the paid-for version, you can create an “infinity grid” that allows you to set milestones.

You can also use hashtags to create, well, tags. Here I’ve added “#psych100” to a task. That automatically makes “#psych100” clickable.

When I click it, all of my tasks are filtered to only show those tasks with that hashtag. The filtering tag is now displayed at the top of the grid. To stop filtering, click the tag button.

You can also you the @ symbol to identify particular people. It works just like the hashtag.

Click it to filter by that tag. When you’re done filtering, click the tag button to toggle off filtering.

Conclusion.

Play around with this tool to find the best way to configure Sandglaz so it works how you work. Keep an eye on their blog for announcements of new features.

Web browsers have gotten smarter. Enter a few letters and the browser flips through your browsing history to find matches. Want to go even faster? Check out Shortmarks. When I type gm into my web browser’s address bar and hit enter, Google Mail opens. When I type im Jodie foster, my browser automatically searches IMDB for Jodie Foster.

Shortmarks starts you off with a bunch of shortcuts. Here are some. Most of these were already provided by Shortmarks. The keyword is in the first column. Typing this in your browser’s address bar will open the site it’s attached to. If you don’t like the keyword, you can change it. Click on “Edit bookmarks.”

That calls up the edit page. When I type cal in my browser’s address bar, Google calendar opens. But I can change that just by clicking in that keyword box and typing something else.

Adding new shortmarks.

One way to add a new shortmark is to go to the Shortmarks edit page, enter the keyword you’d like to use, name the page, and enter the link to the page. Click save. Done.

A quicker way is to go to the Shortmarks help page, and drag the “Add to Shortmarks” link to your browser’s bookmark bar. Now visit any page you’d like to create a shortmark for. Click “Add to Shortmarks” on your browser’s bookmark bar. The Shortmarks edit page will open with the name of the page and the URL already entered. Just enter the keyword you’d like to use, and click save. Done.

Searching websites.

Notice the far right shortmarks column; it’s labeled “Search link” (see above). Some websites have built-in search capability. Let’s take Google search for example.

With this shortmark, if I type g in my browser’s address bar, the Google search page will open. If I had typed g steelers instead, shortmarks would have used the URL in the last column, and I would have jumped directly to Google’s search result for “steelers”. Typing w takes me to Wikipedia. If I had typed w dachshund instead, then the dachshund entry at Wikipedia would have opened.

[Added  12/9/2011.] To add your own search, go to the page you want to search, and enter a search term.  For example, go to Barnes and Noble and search for Unbroken.  That will give you this very ugly URL:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/unbroken?keyword=unbroken&store=allproducts.

Delete everything back to the first “unbroken”.  That gives you this:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/.

Now add %s so it looks like this:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%s.

That’s what you will enter into Shortmarks’ search link box.

Make bn your Shortmark keyword.  Remember to hit save. Now when you type bn catcher in the rye into your browser’s address bar, you will be directed to the page at Barnes and Noble that displays all of their Catcher in the Rye holdings.

Bundles.

Have several shortmarks you’d like to open together? Use a bundle. If I type !d in my browser’s address bar, the sites I open first thing in the morning open. If I type !hcc four sites open, all related to my college.

To edit them, click “Edit” like you did for editing shortmarks. The bundles are located at the very bottom of the page. Add the keyword you’d like to use for your bundle, add a description, and then entry the keywords for the links you’d like to have included in the bundle.

[Updated 11/22/2011] It works best when Shortmarks is designated as your default browser.  Enter a search term in the address bar.  Your browser will go to Shortmarks.  If you have a shortmark for what you’ve typed, the shortmark will launch the appropriate webpage.  If there isn’t a shortmark, the term will be entered in the default search engine you have enabled in Shortmarks.  See this Shortmarks help page for how to change your browser’s default search engine to Shortmarks.

Shortmarks is easy to use and easy to customize, and it does speed up browsing considerably. One more thing. Since your shortmarks are linked to your Google account and stored in the ‘cloud,’ you’ll have access to them anywhere you’re logged into your Google account.

As a short footnote, I got shortmarks to work on my smartphone once, but only once. Since this service is still in beta, look for the possibility of mobile functionality in the future. These kinds of shortcuts would be a terrific addition to my mobile browser!

One more quick tip. CTRL-L sends your cursor to your browser’s address bar, and whatever is there will be highlighted. Just type your shortmark keyword and hit enter.

I tried out a new assignment in my Psych 100 course this quarter. After students have done the assigned reading, but before we cover it in class, students are asked to reflect on what they found particularly interesting in the reading and why the average person on the street should know that information. They’ve been emailing me their responses, which has greatly increased the volume of email in my mailbox. I thought there must be a better way.

And then I remembered that you can create forms in Google Docs.

I’m not a heavy user of Google Docs, I prefer Dropbox as my cloud storage solution, but for gathering this kind of data, Google Docs is the way to go. I create a form and link to it from my website or LMS (e.g., Angel), students fill out the form, and the data is recorded in a Google spreadsheet. When I’m ready to grade, I just open the spreadsheet, and record the scores in a new column. To get the score to the students, I have several options. I can record the score in my LMS. I can open my email and email students one by one. Or I can download the spreadsheet to Excel, create a form letter in Word, and use mail merge to email my students. (See this blog post for instructions on how to use mail merge.)

Creating form.

In Google Docs, click “CREATE” and select “Form” from the dropdown menu.

That will call up this screen. Click on “Untitled form” to add a title. Google gives you two sample questions to start with. For question 1, I’ll change the question title and the question type, and then I’ll check the box to make it a required question.

Here I’ve named the form “Reading Assignment” and added some text that explains when the assignment is due. I want the first question to be about which class section the student is in. When Google Docs produces the spreadsheet, the first column will contain a timestamp. I want the second column (first question in the form), to be the class section so I can sort on class section, then time. That way I’ll be able to grade each class as a group, and I’ll be able to see which students at the bottom of the group turned their assignments in late just by looking at the column to the immediate left.

For the question title, I opted for “Which class are you in?” Next, under “Question Type” I clicked the down arrow to change the question type to checkboxes. I created a checkbox for each of the classes I’ll have next quarter. Then I checked the box to make it a required question.

Click the “Done” button to exit editing question one.

I’m now ready to move onto question two. On the far right side of each question are three icons. Click the pencil to edit the question. Click the squares icon to duplicate the question. Click the trashcan to delete the question.

I’ll click the pencil to edit it.

With the first column being the timestamp and the second column the class time, I’d like the third column to be last name and the fourth first name.

I’ll change the question title to “Your last name” and check the box that makes it a required question. Clicking “done” gives me this. But I obviously want more questions than this. In the top left corner, click “Add item”.

That gives me this drop down menu. I want this question to be the first name, so a text question is fine.

The “who are you” questions are done. Since this is a repeating assignment, I’m going to use the “Choose from a list” question type to enter all of the chapters covered in my course. Students can just click the dropdown menu and select the chapter they’re addressing in their assignment.

Now I’m ready for the assignment questions. For these I’m going to choose “Paragraph text” for the question type because I want to give students more space in which to write. The more space that’s available, the more people tend to write. In the “Help text” section of each of these questions, I’ve added “Click and hold on the bottom right corner of the box to expand it.”

This is what my final form looks like.

If you would like to reorder your questions, just click and hold on a question, and move it wherever you’d like.

Get the link.

At the very bottom of the screen, I see this.

Click the link to go to the form page. I’ll copy the URL and paste it on my course webpage.

When my students follow the URL, this will be what they see.

Alternatively, embed the form on a webpage. To get the code, click on “More actions” and select “Embed”.

Copy the html code and paste it wherever you’d like the form to appear. Within your LMS or webpage editor, you’ll need to switch to “html view” to do that.

The data.

However I get the form to my students, they’ll fill it out, and I’ll need to see what they entered.

When I go into Google Docs, my new form appears at the top of my list of documents.

When I click on it, it takes me to the spreadsheet. If I would like to edit the form page, I can just click “Form” at the top of the page. Notice that the chapter column is in the last column rather than right after the first name column as it appears on my form. That’s because I added the chapter question after someone (me) entered data on the form. If I had moved the question before data had been entered on the form, the column would have appeared in the correct place.

I clicked on the column and dragged it to the right location. I got a warning that the form may not work correctly if I do that, but for me the form continued to work just fine.

Rather than leave this data in Google Docs, I’ll download it to my computer as an Excel file. Once downloaded, I’ll delete the data from the Google spreadsheet. That will keep the data in that file manageable. With 80 students submitting something for each chapter, if I left all the data in the Google spreadsheet, I would have over 800 lines in the file by the end of the term.

To download, go to file, “Download as”, then “Excel”.

Notification.

I’m going to ask Google to email me once a day with a summary if anyone fills out the form. Go to “Tools” then “Notification rules” to get this window. When someone fills out the form, I want Google to email me. But only once a day. I just want a reminder that there are assignments ready to be graded.

That’s it! It takes a little time to set up the form, but once it’s set up, you can use it term after term. If you have several sections you want to use this with, consider creating a separate form for each class. Or a separate form for each assignment. If you try it out, please let me know how it worked for you.

On the “Tech Handout” page I now have two documents. One is my general tech handout; the other focuses on collaboration tools. At some point I’ll probably merge them into one big document, but until then I have two. Both have a QR code at the top. I noticed that they were different codes. I wondered where they went.

At this point I had a number of options. Leave them as is and continue to wonder. Go find my phone and scan them. Or search the internet for a QR code decoder. I opted for the latter and used Esponce as my decoder.

I saved both codes to my desktop, went to the Esponce website, then dragged one code into the box,

And it gave me this.

The other one, for the curious went directly to the tech handout page.

Want to try it yourself? Right-click on each of the QR codes above and save them to your desktop. Go to, and drag and drop each in turn.

To generate a QR code, on the Esponce website, select the Generate” tab. I’ve also recommended QRstuff.com for such a purpose. For more on QR codes, see this earlier blog post.