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 with Chrome. Now, in all fairness, Firefox 7 is supposed to be faster than 6, so I just did the download, and its speed certainly appears to be on par with Chrome’s. But I’m a little gun-shy. Chrome, for now, is my primary browser.

And I’m not the only one. New data shows that Chrome’s global market share has grown 9 percentage points since January. It’s expected to slip into the second spot behind Internet Explorer by the end of the year. “As of Wednesday [9/28/2011], Chrome’s global average user share for September [2011] was 23.6%, while Firefox’s stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%” (Computer World, 9/29/11).

Speaking of market share, according to ComShare Android continues to eat it up jumping 5.6 percentage points between May and August. My original Motorola Droid is starting to feel like a Commodore 64 in comparison to the newest products on the market. I was considering moving to the Droid Bionic on Verizon’s 4G network, but with the Droid Prime rumored to be available in November, I think I’ll wait.

And the last Google product on my mind is Gmail. In an earlier blog post I suggested that you unplug yourself from your email. That advice still holds, but with one more addition. IBM Research found that filing email in folders may be a waste of time. If you use your email’s search function, it takes an average of 17 seconds to find an email. If you dig through your folders to find it, it takes an average of 58 seconds to find it. (See this LifeHacker blog post for the summary and a link to a pdf of the original study.)

When Gmail was first introduced a number of people panicked. “No folders?! How can I find what I need if there are no folders?!” You search your email for it.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to let my Outlook folders go. When I’m looking for a particular email message, I usually just use Xobni to search for it. But I am inspired. Perhaps I will get rid of my folders as they currently exist, but create new ones that are specific to tasks. For example, I already have a “grade these” folder for the assignments my students submit electronically. There’s no reason I can’t create new folders that serve a similar purpose.

How do you manage your email? Does it work for you?

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’s your time.  You can use it however you’d like.

I was just talking with a colleague, Kaddee L., who has decided that she doesn’t need work email sent to her phone between 6pm and 8am on weekdays or at all on weekends.  Walking around with our work email being delivered to us 24/7 wherever we might be makes it hard to let our brains take a break from work.  Taking a page from Kaddee’s book, I just turned off push notification to my phone during those times.  (Android users: Check out the email program Touchdown; $20, but worth it.  Thanks to Rich B. that tip!) 

Having a hard time turning away from your email?  You know what?  It’s not life or death.  It’s just education.  Email can wait.

Are you frequently distracted by email?  It’s okay to close your email program while you work on that concentration-heavy task.  Really, it’s okay.

The author also suggests zipping through email quickly.  Read a message and decide what to do with it.  Delete it if it’s not relevant to you.  If you think it might be at some future point, file it away.  Reply if a reply is warranted.  (Another colleague, Ruth F., finds the conversation view in Outlook very helpful. On Outlook’s ‘View’ tab, check ‘Show as Conversations.’ Click on ‘Conversation Settings’ to tweak how it looks. Try different combinations until you find the one that works for you.)

If a particular email is not something you want to deal with right now, there are a number of options for getting it out of your inbox so you can focus only on what needs to be dealt with now.

Outlook: Use the follow-up feature in Outlook to be pinged with a reminder.  There are standard times, but you can also customize for any date or time.

Followup.cc: Forward the message to, say, tomorrow@followup.cc, and tomorrow morning at 7am, followup.cc will send you that message back. (No attachments, though.)  Nothing special about ‘tomorrow.’ Choose any future date or time.  Still not ready for it?  Click the embedded snooze link for the time you want to see it again. (See this blog post for more info: http://suefrantz.com/2010/12/10/followup-cc-remind-yourself/)

Simplyfile: This is a little program that integrates with Outlook.  It lets you quickly file email messages into folders.  By quickly, I mean one mouse click or one keyboard shortcut.  It also has a “snooze it” function.  Any message you ‘snooze’ gets dropped into a ‘snooze’ folder.  You assign a date and time for that message to be returned to your inbox.  It will reappear at the date and time if was originally from, so only use this if you can keep your inbox uncluttered.  (See this blog post for more info: http://suefrantz.com/2009/08/11/simplyfile-an-outlook-addin/)

One last bit of psychological research for productivity.  Minimize barriers.  Whatever you want to get done, remove as many barriers as you can between you and the task.  If I need to grade electronic assignments, I open them on my computer.  Even if I don’t grade them then, they will be ready to go when the mood strikes.  Want to go to the gym tomorrow?  Pack up your stuff and set it by the front door the night before.  It works the other way, too.  Want to reduce the amount that you snack?  Put the snacks in the back of a cupboard – in the garage – of your friend – who lives on the other side of town. 

Now, take a deep breath.  Close your email.  And get to work on that project that’s been nagging you.

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 their instructor as a ‘reader’ so the instructor can stop in to see how the map is progressing. Alternatively, students can save the map as an image and email it to their instructor.

While I really like this tool, I should note that it’s still technically in beta. As of this writing, there hasn’t been an update to the SpiderScibe blog since June.

“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 26^th (no session on September 21^st).

Visit the PowerPoint blog to see the list of speakers.  Or visit the OutstandingPresentationsWorkshops.com website.

Register here.

Hope to see you there!

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 appointment with you. When are you free?

Instructor: <looks at calendar> I’m free at these times. What time would you like?

Student: <looks at calendar> I’m not available at any of those times. How about one of these times?

Instructor: <looks at calendar> I can do X time. See you then.

Student: Great!

X time arrives, student doesn’t show.

With YouCanBook.Me

Instructor posts URL for making appointments. Student visits URL and selects a time. Appointment is added to instructor’s calendar. Student gets a reminder email a few hours before the appointment. Student gets a cancellation link to use in case of the need to cancel.

It was almost a year ago that I first wrote about the free service YouCanBook.Me, and I did a quick follow-up a month later. Since then YouCanBook.Me has been redesigned with a lot of new features. It’s time for an update.

Recap: YouCanBook.Me allows others to schedule an appointment in my calendar. It accesses my Google Calendar, and then shows my free times to those who need to make an appointment. The visitor clicks on a time, fills out the form, and that appointment is automatically added to my Google Calendar. I get an email letting me know of the appointment and the appointment-maker gets an email. The appointment-maker also gets a reminder email a few hours before the appointment. Both of those emails contain a cancellation link. To cancel, the appointment-maker clicks the URL to go to a website where they then just click the cancel button. When canceled, the appointment is automatically removed from my Google Calendar.

To see what it’s like, you’re welcome to schedule an appointment with me using my fall quarter calendar. When you get the confirmation email, follow the cancellation link to cancel it.

YouCanBook.Me is fully customizable with an easy-to-use user interface. As you read through this post, it may feel like a lot to do. It really isn’t. YouCanBook.Me uses a lot of default settings that will work just fine. Make any changes you’d like to customize your YouCanBook.Me calendar. Below I show you the settings I use and explain why.

Before you get started, you’ll need a Google calendar account. I sync my Google calendar with Outlook; any changes I make to one are changed in the other.

After creating a YouCanBook.Me account, you’ll be prompted to create a new calendar. You can create as many calendars as you’d like. I have five: fall quarter, winter quarter, spring quarter, meet-and-greet, and a general calendar with no fixed start or end dates. My main calendars are my quarter calendars, so I’ll show you what the dashboard to my fall quarter calendar looks like.

Basic Tab

Once you create your new calendar, you’ll be taken to the basic tab on the dashboard. This tab lets you customize the look of the main calendar page, what’s picture in the image above.

[Note: Below each dashboard area YouCanBook.Me will display what this area will look like to the users of your calendar. I didn’t include them in this post to reduce clutter.]

[Another note: Any time you’re unsure what a particular area does, in YouCanBook.Me click the little red question mark next to it. A new window will pop up with more information.]

Next to calendar you can see that my Google Calendar named “Sue Frantz” is being used. My free and busy times will be pulled from that calendar, and any appointments YouCanBook.Me makes on my behalf will be added to that calendar.

For subdomain, you can change that to anything you’d like. It will default to the first half of the email address that you used when you created your YouCanBook.Me account. Here I’ve changed mine to sfrantz-fall since it’s my fall quarter calendar. That is the URL I give my students: http://sfrantz-fall.youcanbook.me.

Enter the title you’d like to give your calendar. This will appear at the top of your calendar page.

Enter the text you’d like to appear above your calendar times.

Any changes you make are automatically saved. No need to worry about losing your settings.

Times Tab

Select your start and end times for each day. While my personal calendar shows that I’m free at 6am, my YouCanBook.Me calendar doesn’t start looking at my Google calendar until 9:30am.

Times are available every 15 minutes (9:30, 9:45, 10:00, 10:15, etc.). The minimum amount of time available for making an appointment is 15 minutes and the maximum is 60 minutes. This means that a student could select a 9:45am appointment time and then reserve 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes.

My calendar is set to display one week per page starting today (today plus the next 6 days). You can choose to display as many weeks or as many days as you’d like. And you can choose to start the calendar on any day of the week. For example, if you chose Sunday, then Sunday through this Saturday would be displayed, even if today were Wednesday.

If you have a set lunch time, you can block that time out here. Or you can leave these times blank, as I have done, and block out time in your Google calendar.

Advanced Tab

Minimum notice is how soon from now an appointment can be made. Mine is set at 12 hours. If a student is looking at my YouCanBook.Me calendar at 11pm, the earliest appointment the student can make is at 11am the next day. The 9:30am – 10:45am slots will be unavailable.

While I have the time zone set to my own time zone, YouCanBook.Me will use the time zone set on the appointment-maker’s computer. YouCanBook.Me knows that my calendar starts at 9:30am PT. If someone who is on central time accesses the calendar, the times will change so that the earliest time would be 11:30 CT. I also let users change the time zone from their default. Let’s say that I have a student visiting family in Chicago. When the student calls up the calendar, the times will all show as central time. The student can change the time zone to pacific as he or she considers an appointment time upon returning to the pacific time zone.

The ‘jump to date’ button allows users to jump to a future date instead of using the arrow to click through weeks.

Since this is my fall quarter calendar, I have set the fixed start and end dates to correspond to the quarter.

Minutes clear before new and minutes clear after new are useful if you need time to get from one place to another. Since most appointments will be in my office, I don’t need time before or after an appointment. If I were a clinical psychologist seeing clients, for example, I would give myself 10 minutes ‘after new’ to write up my client notes.

‘Units per slot’ allows you to let more than one person schedule in a time slot. Let’s say that you had a computer lab with 5 computers and students could reserve time at those computers in advance. Set ‘units per slot’ to 5. Any given time will show as being free until 5 appointments have been made for that time.

Add a password if you’d like. Only those who have the password can make an appointment on your calendar.

Earlier I mentioned that I have a meet-and-greet calendar. This calendar has a fixed start date at the beginning of the quarter and a fixed end date three weeks later. The appointment slots are 5 minutes each. I haven’t done this yet, but I plan to invite students to visit me in my office for a quick chat. I’m thinking of offering 2 points extra credit (out of 400+ points available in the course) to those who accept the invitation. If a student uses this calendar to schedule an appointment from 9:30 to 9:35, slots 9:35 and 9:40 will remain open. On my fall quarter calendar where the minimum appointment time is 15 minutes, the 9:30 to 9:45 time slot will show as unavailable.

Booking Form

After students have selected an appointment time, say 9:30am on September 26th, they get this page.

The fields on this page are customizable using the booking form tab.

The appointment time will be set to the ‘start time’, that’s the time the student clicked to get to the booking form. In this case, 9:30am on September 26.

‘Your Name’, ‘Your Email’, and ‘Reason for Meeting’ are all required fields as denoted by the asterisk.

As you can see in the image above, this is the ‘Your Name’ field. It’s a ‘simple question’ where the text is just ‘Your Name’, and I’ve checked the box next to ‘this is a required field.’

For the ‘Your Email’ field, the question type is ’email address’. By using ’email address’ as the question type, YouCanBook.Me will use what the student enters here to email the confirmation and reminder emails.

For ‘Reason for Meeting’, the question type is ‘multi-line question’. That just gives the student a bigger box in which to write.

For ‘How long would you like to meet’, the question type is ‘booking duration.’ This question type refers back to the times tab where you entered information about the minimum booking (I said 15 minutes) and maximum booking (I said 60 minutes). When the question type is ‘booking duration’, the student will see a dropdown menu that gives four options: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 60 minutes.

To add a new question, click ‘add a question’, choose the question type, and add the text you’d like the student to see.

Afterwards Tab

This is what the student sees after making the appointment.

The screen that appears simply says “Your meeting has been scheduled.” As you can see below, the messages tab is where that text goes.

The Google tab controls what is entered in your Google calendar.

I created an appointment using YouCanBook.Me for a half hour appointment on September 26^th.

These settings…

… generated this entry in my Google calendar:

{CREATED} enters the time the appointment was made. {REF} is the unique reference number YouCanBook.Me assigned to this particular appointment. {IP} is the IP address of the computer that made the appointment. {FORMFIELDS} are the fields you asked the appointment-maker to complete when they made the appointment. In this case, I asked the student to enter their name, their email address, and the reason for meeting. Those get entered in the order in which they are listed on the booking form.

‘Add to Google’ is what gets entered in the main calendar line. When I look at my Google calendar, this is what I see.

YouCanBook.Me defaults to entering the email address here: ‘booked: {EMAIL}’. Having the person’s name here is more valuable to me than their email address. I replaced {EMAIL} with {2}. Why {2}? Let’s look at the booking form again.

The first field is the appointment time. The second field is name. I’m telling YouCanBook.Me to enter that second field next to ‘booked:’ for my Google calendar entry.

On the ’email to you’ tab, I checked the box to say that I want an email when a new appointment is made, and I include the email address I want the message sent to. If you want it sent to multiple email addresses, add as many as you’d like, separated by commas.

Use the ‘sms to you’ tab if you want a text message sent to your phone when a new appointment is made. I don’t use this since my minimum advanced notice is 12 hours and I’m getting messages via email.

The ’email to user’ tab is for sending a confirmation email to the appointment-maker.

Enter the subject line for the email, your name, the ‘from’ address (if the appointment-maker hits ‘reply’ in their email program, the email will go to this address), a logo URL (totally optional — I use my college’s logo), and then whatever text you’d like. {WHEN}, {FORMFIELDS} (what the student entered on the booking form when the appointment was made), and {CANCEL} option are all automatically entered here. I would advise not changing them. Feel free to add any text you’d like though. For example, I included ‘Where’ so students know where they are going.

The ‘sms to user’ tab allows YouCanBook.Me to send a confirmation text to the appointment-maker. To use this feature you need to ask students for their cell phone number on the booking form. You also need to have sms credits in your account. Each credit is 16 cents. Email is fine for me.

Cancellation Tab

In the confirmation and reminder emails appointment-makers get a URL to follow if they need to cancel. The URL takes them to a page that displays the following.

The content of this page is controlled by the cancellation tab. Add your own text to the box if you’d like. {START} enters the date and time of the appointment that’s to be canceled.

Reminders Tab

Before the appointment, the appointment-maker will receive a reminder email if you activate this option.

Check the box next to ’email reminder (for others)’. Set the time you want the email sent. Enter the subject line, your name, your email address, a logo URL if you’d like, and the text. {WHEN} and {CANCEL} are automatically included just like in the confirmation email.

Appearance Tab

Use this tab to customize the look of your YouCanBook.Me calendar.

Choose from one of the standard designs. Choose ‘format as’ ‘a stand-alone page’ if you intend to just point students to your YouCanBook.Me calendar. If you want to embed it in an existing page, say, inside your course management system, select ‘a component to embed on a bigger page’. Select the colours and fonts tabs to change the colors and fonts. Use the css tab if you want to create your own css template.

Conclusion

The YouCanBook.Me developers frequently add features. For example, at this writing, the teams and services tabs are new.

Let’s say that your department has four tutors for one of your courses. Each tutor could create a Google calendar for tutoring, each one sharing that calendar with you. Each tutor blocks off the times they are unavailable in their tutoring calendar. In YouCanBook.Me, under the team tab, enter the information for each tutor. You will have one YouCanBook.Me URL to give to students who are looking for a tutor. Each tutor’s name will appear. The student looking for tutoring can click on the name of the person they want, and then make an appointment on their calendar.

For services, if you had specific services that required specific times, this tab is a nice addition. Let’s say I added ‘advising’ and ‘test review’. I could designate advising as a 30 minute appointment and test review as a 15 minute appointment. The YouCanBook.Me URL would take students to a page where they’d choose from the services offered, in this case advising or test review. Instead of choosing the length of the appointment themselves, YouCanBook.Me would automatically do it.

If you try out YouCanBook.Me, let me know how it works for you!

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’s score. If it’s a 200 point question, click + once, and 200 points will be added to the team’s score. If you do not click + or -, the question will remain available on the board. Clicking multiple times will add multiples of the question’s value.

Click “Continue” to return to the board where the chosen question has been removed. You can, however, still click on the box to reveal the question. The score can be seen at the bottom of the board.

No fancy Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy, though.

Building a Jeopardy board is easy. Click in the appropriate boxes to change the title and category names. Click on a numbered box to enter the answers and questions.

Click save at the bottom of the board when you’re done. You’ll be redirected to a page that will provide you for the URL for your board. Bookmark it. That’s the only way you’ll be able to get to it to run the game or edit it, unless you create an account and donate money to the site creator – a worthwhile expense if you intend to make heavy use of the site.

Quick Tech Tip: In the Firefox search box, click the icon on the left side of the box to select other search locations. Click “Manage Search Engines” to find others to include.

New blog feature: Quick Tech Tips (QTT). These will be short and sweet. Think of them as a technological amuse bouche.

Windows users: To minimize all of your windows, press the windows key on your keyboard and simultaneously press M.

Windows key

[Update: See a more recent post on new features.]

This is the tool I’ve been waiting for. Socrative turns your students’ smartphones into a powerful student response system. It’s like PollEverywhere (see this earlier post), but with greater flexibility and ease-of-use, the ability to attach student names to electronic quizzes, and free – even when you have more than 30 students. This promises to be a real challenge to the makers of student response systems.

You and your students have options for accessing Socrative. Access it via the website using a computer or any web-enabled mobile device. For the mobile devices, you can either just access the website, or you can download the free app (Android or iPhone). I tested it out by visiting the Socrative teacher site on my computer and using the student app on my Xoom.

Socrative includes a simulation on their website, so I took the liberty of taking screenshots. You can try it out yourself by going to the Socrative website, and clicking on “Hands-On Demo” in the lower right corner.

To experience it yourself, on your ‘teacher’ device, go to http://t.socrative.com. On your ‘student’ device, go to http://m.socrative.com. Yes, it’s just that easy. In class, you go to the ‘t’ website and send your students to the ‘m’ website. If you or your students have the app, just run the app.

Connecting student devices to the teacher’s device

On the lecturer’s device, you see “my room number”. When students run the app or visit http://m.socrative.com, they’ll be asked to enter a room number. They just enter the number you have on your device. You can change that number if you’d like. Just select “Change room number” (it’s on the bottom half of the menu, not visible in the screenshot). The number doesn’t have to be a number. It can be text, say, your name or the name of your course. Whatever you choose will be remembered both on your device and your students’ devices. The student’s device will show “Waiting for teacher to start an activity” until you, well, start an activity.

Multiple Choice Questions

Pose a multiple choice question orally, or by writing it on the board, or in your presentation slides. Tap “Multiple Choice”, and the students will be given A through E options.

Once the student chooses, the instructor gets a bar graph, and the student’s device goes back into waiting mode. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no way to display this bar graph to students other than displaying your device using an opaque projector, or if you’re using your computer’s web browser, displaying the web page.

Short Answer Questions

Pose a short answer question to your students. On your device, tap “Short Answer”. That generates a response box on the student’s device.

Here the student entered “I have no idea what the answer is.” That appears on your device, and the student’s device goes back into waiting mode.

Now, if you’d like, you can have students’ vote on the best responses by tapping “Vote on responses.” Each student device now shows all of the short answer responses that were submitted. In this case, just one.

Quick Quiz (Self-Paced)

In a quick quiz, you give students a set of pre-planned questions. After a student submits one question, they move onto the next one, and the next until they’re finished. The first question should be their name.

Here you can see that there is one active user in the room. We know that because that’s how many devices have entered the Socrative room number. At this point, no one has completed the quiz.

The student has answered all 4 questions in the quiz. On the lecturer’s device, click “Live Results” to see who has responded and how they did. Once everyone has completed the quiz, click “End Activity & Send Report.” An Excel spreadsheet will be soon emailed to you with all of the data from the quiz.

This is what the spreadsheet looks like. The green-filled boxes are correct answers; the red-filled are incorrect.

Tip: On the quizzes, change the first question about name into two questions. Question 1: Enter your last name. Question 2: Enter your first name. When you get the spreadsheet, you can sort by last name for easy entry into your gradesheet.

Exit Ticket

The Exit Ticket works in much the same way as quizzes. With 5 to 10 minutes left in class, click “Exit Ticket” and students respond with their name and quick responses to a question, such as “define independent variable.” Research has shown that responding to open-ended questions related to the course content at the end of class improves performance on exams. [See for example: Lyle, K.B. & Crawford, N.A. (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. Teaching of Psychology, 38, pp. 94-97.]

The Exit Ticket should be editable, but as of this writing it doesn’t appear to be. Instead, you can accomplish the same thing by giving a Quick Quiz since the Quick Quizzes are editable.

Space Race

Students compete in small groups (maximum: 10) to answer your pre-loaded questions as quickly as they can. The team that gets the most right in the shortest amount of time wins. Again, when you’re done, click the “end activity & send report” button at the bottom of your screen (not shown). You’ll be emailed an Excel spreadsheet with the results.

CONSIDERATIONS

Not all students have smartphones, laptops, netbooks, or other portable web-enabled technology. On the quizzes and the exit ticket, once a student is done responding, they’re given the option to finish or let another student take the quiz. For activities that could potentially have points attached, there’s at least this option. If many of your students don’t have internet access in your classroom, consider pairing students so that the two of them provide one response.

I anticipate trying this out in the fall. If anyone tries it before I do, I’d love to hear what you and your students think of it!

Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for posting on this technology!

TitanPad allows you to quickly collaborate. Create a public pad, copy the URL, and email it to your collaborators. They follow the link, then just start typing in the pad. In the top right corner, new visitors are assigned a color and are named “unnamed”. Clicking in the “unnamed” box will allow them to enter their name. Attached a name to a color allows you and your collaborators to see who added what. If others are logged in at the same time as you, you’ll see their changes as they type. Changes are automatically saved. With the chat window, text will stay there even when you leave. It’s a handy space for leaving messages for your collaborators.

When I last wrote about TitanPad two years ago, that was pretty much all there was to say. They’ve since added a lot of functionality.

Import/export. Import text from, say, a Word document. Or Export your TitanPad to, say, Word document.

Saved revisions. While TitanPad automatically saves, you can also create save points. Use this after a major revision so you can quickly restore to that revision at a later point if you’d like. With this pad, I clicked “save now” at two different points. Now, under “saved revisions” I have two restore points.

Time slider. Below is the time slider view. I can click on the circled bar to move it back in time, then I can click the play button to watch how the document changed over time. The stars designate when I hit “save now” to create a saved revision. But notice that with the time slider, you can move the slider anywhere I’d like, then click “link to” or “download as” to get that specific version.

The newest functionality, though, is the creation of a private space. In effect, the public pads are private. After all, you can only get to an existing pad if someone has given you the URL. But that also meant that you needed to bookmark the URL because that was the only way there was to get to a pad you created.

Now you can create a space where you and your collaborators can see the multiple pads you’re working on. Go to TitanPad and click on “Get your own private space” in the bottom right corner. Name your team site. For example, I might want a team site for my department – hccpsych. The URL I would give to my colleagues would be hccpsych.titanpad.com. Fill out the rest of the form, and click the “create team site now” button. [Note: Notice how it’s called EtherPad here? EtherPad was the original software. When it was no longer being supported, it kind of fell into the public domain. TitanPad was one group that adopted it.]

TitanPad will send you an email with a URL. Following it will take you to TitanPad where you’ll be asked to create a password. When you’re done, you’ll be taken to your main page. To add collaborators, click “Admin”, then “create new account.” To create a new pad, click “create new pad”. You can see all of the pads you’ve created with the “Pads” link.

The pads themselves operate the same way with the addition of two functions. You can name your pad. And there’s now a link at the top of that pad that lets you return to the list of pads you have for your team site.

I’m sometimes asked why use this instead of Dropbox. I use both. I use Dropbox for most storage and sharing of files. I like to use TitanPad for brainstorming, especially when others are editing at the same time. For example, we might be on a conference call, and we call up a TitanPad to take notes so we know we’re all on the same page. . A few times I’ve created a public pad, and sent the URL out on the teaching of psych listservs when I’ve been looking for new examples to use in class. With a public pad, people follow the URL, then just start typing. No login. No need to save. Just type and go.

Can you envision using TitanPad with your students? Maybe for small group work? It’s easy to learn how to use, and it’s easy to see who contributed what and when with the color coding and the time slider.