Here’s some news for the Google calendar users. You can now change the color of an individual event. Click the top of an existing event, then select the down arrow next to the event title. Choose the color you’d like. The top bar where the time is will remain the same color as your calendar, but the section that includes the name of the event will change color.

When you create a new event or click on ‘edit event details,’ you can change the event color there.

You can now mark those especially important meetings in red and the less important in grey. What you do with that information is up to you.

For those of you who have taken the Dropbox plunge, if you signed up with your edu email account Dropbox wants to double the space you get from referrals. That’s now 500MB per referral. And it’s retroactive. That’s right. They’ll double the extra space you’ve already received from referrals.

Just visit this webpage and confirm your email address. Your space will be automatically increased.

If you’re not a Dropbox user, it’s time to sign up. Not familiar with Dropbox? See this earlier blog post.

How do you get space for referrals? Log into your Dropbox.com account, and click on the “Referral Status” tab. At the very bottom of the page, click where it says “Invite more people to join Dropbox!” At the very bottom of that page is URL you can give to friends, family, or complete strangers. If they use that URL to sign up for a Dropbox account, Dropbox will give you an extra 250MB of space – or 500MB if you use your edu email to create your account.

I had a student come by my office yesterday. She has a website where she’d like to have a discussion board for her visitors to use. I knew that there must be some discussion board services out there that will give you html code so that you can embed the board on your website. Of course I couldn’t recommend something without trying it out myself.

I decided to go with Nabble.com. In the navigation bar at the top of this blog click on the new discussion board link to see it in action. The discussion board is for you to post questions and suggestions. I hope you find it useful!

My readers know that I’m a big fan of YouCanBook.Me (see this post). In fact YouCanBook.Me has some new functionality since I last wrote about it, which means I owe you another post on that tool. In short, YouCanBook.Me gives others the power to schedule themselves into your calendar. Some of you let me know that you don’t want to give students that kind of power. For you, Doodle has a new tool.

You may already be familiar with Doodle (see this post) because you’ve used it to get a bunch of people to agree on a time to meet or to vote on some decisions that need to be made.

Doodle just launched a new tool called MeetMe. Other people can see when you’re busy, and they can request a few times as possible meeting times. The key word here is “request.” With YouCanBook.Me, the person chooses the time, and that time is booked in your calendar. With MeetMe, the person requests one or more possible times, and you make the final decision on whether or not you will meet, and, if so, when.

I have a Doodle account that is linked to my Google calendar, so when you visit my Doodle MeetMe page, you see my busy times.

If you were logged into your Doodle account, you would be able to select your calendar, and it would appear next to mine so you could easily see when we were both free. Doodle appears happy to use most web-based calendars such as Google or Yahoo. It looks like you can also use Microsoft Exchange. (If your institution uses Outlook, you’re probably using Exchange.)

Click on the times you’d like to propose. Those appear in blue. Change the length of time by grabbing the small double bars at the bottom of the meeting time and moving them up or down. When you’re satisfied with your choices, click ‘create meeting request.’

If the person who is making the request is logged in to Doodle, it will ask the person if they’d like to have those times blocked off in their own calendar. Handy if you’d like to keep those times blocked off while you wait for the person you’re inviting, in this case, me, to decide.

After the request is made, the person making the request gets an email with a link to follow if they decide they’d like to make changes to the requested times.

As the invited person I get an email asking me to respond to the meeting request by following the link in the email. When I follow the link, I log into Doodle and see the options on my calendar.

When I mouse over one of the requested times, I get this pop-up.

When I click ‘OK,’ the date turns green, and the other requested times go grey. I can also request new dates, ignore the request (harsh!), or reject the proposed times altogether. If I pick a time, as I’ve done here, I can select which calendar, if I’m using more than one, I’d like the appointment added to. If I choose nothing, it’s added to my default calendar. Finally, I click ‘Confirm date’.

But I’m not done yet. On the next page I can type a personal message to be added to the Doodle-generated email if I’d like. In either case, I have to hit ‘send’ on this page to lock in the time and send the person who requested the time an email letting them know which time I chose.

That’s it. The accepted time has been added to my calendar. And the person making the request has been sent an email with the appointment information. If they were logged into their own Doodle account when they made the appointment, the chosen appointment has also been added to their calendar. If they don’t have a Doodle account or a digital calendar, they still have the email with the time and date so they can write it in their Day Planner.

If you decide to give this one a whirl, let me know how it works for you!

As many of you know, I’ve been a fan of Delicious social bookmarks for quite a while. (See this post from two years ago.) Its future came into question recently when Yahoo, who bought Delicious in 2004, decided to yank the staff it had devoted to it. The blogosphere exploded with the suggestions for other social bookmarking sites. I had tried some of those sites before, others I hadn’t heard of. After dancing amongst them, I decided that Delicious was the best choice for me, so I decided to ride it out and see what happened.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I received this email last night:

I followed the link and gave my permission. If you have Delicious bookmarks, you have until July 2011 to give your permission, otherwise you lose access to your account.

Yahoo didn’t do much with Delicious after its purchase in 2004, so I’m very interested in seeing when AVOS’ plans are for what is already a rich tool.

[UPDATE 10/9/2012   : Tegrity now has dual-monitor support for both Macs and PCs.  When you run the Tegrity recorder, if Tegrity detects more than one monitor, it will ask if you’d like to record the current monitor.  If you want to record the other one, click the blue arrow to change monitors.  Very easy!]

Bear with me while I digress from my normal postings. Typically I discuss technology that is freely available to most or about technology that many already have, such as Microsoft Office. This time I’m going to discuss an issue that I spent quite a bit of time working on before hitting upon a solution. This post is for people who meet the following two conditions:

1. You use dual monitors for your presentations. That means that you have your regular computer screen and you have an ‘extended desktop’ projected on a second monitor. In my classroom, my laptop is my main monitor, and what is projected onto the screen that my students see is the secondary monitor (aka ‘extended desktop monitor’).
2. You use Tegrity. Tegrity is lecture capture software. It will record whatever is on your computer screen and webcam and whatever audio is fed through a microphone. In other words, it captures your lecture as you lecture. It’s very helpful for students who missed class, for students who have an accommodation for a notetaker, for ESL students, or for students who just want to hear the instructor’s explanation one more time.

My setup

In the image below, on the left is what my students see projected on the classroom screen. On the right is PowerPoint presenter view (see this blog post if you’re unfamiliar with presenter view. Briefly, the projected screen is duplicated in the top left of the laptop window. My notes are on the right, and at the bottom of my laptop screen is a filmstrip of my slides that allows me to jump to any slide in my presentation.)

The problem

Tegrity only captures what is on my laptop screen (my notes, all of my slides), not what I’ve projected on the classroom screen. I want that to be the other way around. You’d think that Tegrity would be able to detect when dual monitors are in use and allow the user to determine which monitor would be recorded. But, as of this writing, that’s not an option.

The work-around solution

To get Tegrity to record what is on the classroom screen, I need to trade screens. I need to put my computer on the projected screen and put the extended desktop on my laptop.

1. Flip the monitors. For me that means right clicking on my desktop and under ‘graphic properties’ I make the monitor (projected screen) my primary device and make my notebook my secondary device.

   

   My computer’s desktop is now visible on the projected screen. This is what Tegrity will record.

   Tip: If you don’t want your students to see your desktop icons, you can temporarily hide them. Right click on the desktop. Under view, uncheck ‘show desktop icons.’

   

   If I just stop here and run PowerPoint, all of my notes and the filmstrip of my slides will appear on the projected screen, and just the slide will appear on my laptop. Not what I want. To solve that, I need give PowerPoint some instructions.

2. Flip PowerPoint presenter view. Open the PowerPoint presentation, and on the Slide Show tab, check ‘Use Presenter View.’ Directly above that, where it says “Show On:’ select ‘Primary Monitor.’ In step one, we made the ‘primary monitor’ the projected screen. That means that slides will now be projected on the classroom screen. This will need to be done for all of your PowerPoint files. Once you change one PowerPoint file, all of the others (just in the same folder?) will change as well. [Updated  5/3/2011.]

   

In a nutshell

Tegrity will only record the primary monitor. What I’ve done is make the projected screen the primary monitor, and I’ve told PowerPoint to project slides onto the primary monitor.

As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Dropbox (see this earlier post). Dropbox adds a new folder to your ‘My Documents’ folder called ‘My Dropbox.’ Let’s say that you’ve created a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Important Committee.’ Inside that folder are several other folders. Let’s say one of them is called ‘Stuff to Share.’ You want to share this folder with your fellow committee members for coordinating the work of your committee. But you don’t want to move your entire committee folder to Dropbox, and you don’t want to pull that one subfolder out; you like to keep your files neatly organized in one place.

Enter Dropbox Folder Sync.

After it’s installed, and you tell it where your ‘My Dropbox’ folder is located, just right click on your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder and select ‘Sync with Dropbox.’ Dropbox Folder Sync will effectively move your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder to your ‘My Dropbox’ folder, white creating a shadow folder (called a symbolic link) at its original location in the ‘Important Committee’ folder. Add a file to ‘Stuff to Share’ in either location, and the file will immediately appear in the other location. Edit a file in one location, and the edited file will appear in the other location.

If you choose the 2.0 Beta version, you also get an unsync option. Right click on the folder that’s in its original location, and select ‘UnSync with Dropbox.’ The folder in ‘My Dropbox’ will be deleted, and all of that folder’s files will only, once again, reside in the original location.

How slick is that?

In December 2010 I wrote a post about Corkboard, a virtual bulletin board.

They just announced some new features.

You’re welcome to play around with this live board.

If you have frequently-changing content for your students, it would be easy enough to embed a corkboard in your website or course management system (CMS), and just update the sticky notes as needed. No need to edit your website or CMS.

Have other uses for it? Leave a comment!

I’m a Firefox user, mostly because of the add-ons. These are my favorites.

Colorful Tabs. I typically have 5-10 tabs open at one time. Having them colorized help me pick them out quickly. The tab I’m currently on is brighter than the others and the page title is bolded. The add-on comes with the ability to customize in many different ways. For example, you can have Colorful Tabs generate colors at random, but you can also specify certain colors for certain domains. For example, my Google Reader tab is always aqua.

Delicious Bookmarks. As a Delicious user I’m frequently bookmarking interesting websites. With this add-on, I can right-click on any page to “bookmark this page in Delicious.” Alternatively, CTRL-D does the same thing. CTRL-Shift-Y calls up a dialog box where I can type in a tag. When I hit “OK,” I’m taken to my bookmarks that carry that tag. CTRL-B opens a sidebar where I can see all of my tags and all of my bookmarks, complete with a handy search box where I can search either the full text of the bookmarked webpages or just the tags.

Download Helper. This add-on gives me a small icon on the navigation toolbar that is available on websites that contain video. By right-clicking the icon, I can download almost any video file. In this example, you can see that I’m about to download the video from my “Grading Electronically” blog post.

F1 by Mozilla Labs. Quickly share any webpage to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or by email (gmail or yahoo mail). Click the icon in the top right corner or click F1, to make the entry fields appear. I have mine set up to go to Facebook or be sent from my gmail account or my yahoo mail account.

Google Shortcuts. Add your Google services as icons to the navigation bar. When I click an icon, the related webpage will open in a new browser tab. Here I can access my Google: mail, voice, reader, maps, books, calendar, analytics, URL shortener (goo.gl), web history, Android app inventor, and settings for Google shortcuts where I can add or delete icons.

LastPass. This will generate passwords and save them as well other webform responses, and automatically enter them when I visit the webpage in the future.

New Tab King. When I open a new tab in Firefox, this is what I see. The search box gives me the sites I’ve visited first before offering to search the web for me. Below are the thumbnails for the 9 most-visited websites, each is an active weblink. By mousing over a thumbnail, as I did in the first one, I can click the thumbtack to pin it in that position. If I don’t pin it, the most-visited site will always appear in that position. On the right I have quick access to recently closed tabs, web shortcuts and shortcuts for applications, such as my computer’s calculator. Click the cog in the upper right corner to access settings.

QR Link Maker. Right click on any webpage (or image or email address, or phone number), and select “QR code.” A QR code will be generated. Right click on the code to copy or save. (See this blog post for more about QR codes.)

If you’re a Firefox user, what are your favorite add-ons?

I’ve been a big proponent of Google calendar as a personal calendar clearinghouse, and I’m also a fan of Doodle for finding a time when everyone can get together for a meeting. While you can enter all of your free times in by hand when creating your Doodle poll, you can also let Doodle pull in your Google calendar and identify the free times for you.

Go to Doodle.com. At the bottom of the page, click “Google Calendar.”

On the next page, click “Connect with Google.”

Doodle will ask you to log in. If you don’t already have a Doodle.com account (free), you’ll need to register for one.

Your Doodle.com settings page will appear. Click “Connect new Google account.”

Google will let you know that Doodle is asking for permission to access your calendar. Give it permission. Doodle will confirm that your Doodle account is connected to your Google account. That means that when you’re logged into Doodle and are scheduling a new event, Doodle will automatically access your Google calendar.

Go back to the main Doodle page and select “Schedule an Event” as you normally do. In step 1, you title your event and provide a description. In step 2, your Google calendar will load. Make sure the time zone is correct. Check which calendars you want to see. Here I’ve only checked my primary “Sue Frantz” calendar.

Now that you can easily see when you’re free, click on the times you want. Everything in blue is a time I’ve designated as a possibility for my meeting. You can see them in list view on the far left.

Navigate through the remaining steps as you normally would. That’s it.

Doodle does NOT change your Google calendar. All it is doing is bringing up Google calendar so you can see when you’re free and lets you choose times.

Share calendars

One more tip while I have you thinking about Doodle. If there are people with whom you frequently schedule meetings, you can all share your free/busy times with each other through Doodle.

Next to your email address in the top right corner of any Doodle page, click “Manage Account.” Then click “Share calendars.”

Put in the email address of the person you want to see your free/busy times and check the box(es) for the calendar(s) you wish to share. Important: The people you are sharing with must have a Doodle account; check with them to see which email address they use to log in to Doodle.

Of course is you are at an institution that uses Outlook, you already have built-in access to everyone’s free/busy times. If you’re working with people at different institutions on a long-term project, this kind of access could be a real time saver.

Happy Doodling with Google!