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In spring of 2022, I wrote about some of the very cool features in MS PowerToys for Windows 10 and 11, such as highlighting the mouse pointer (very handy with three screens) and creating fixed zones on the desktop to drop windows into (also very handy with three screens). The good folks at Microsoft have just released a PowerToys update with three new features: text extractor, quick accent, and screen ruler. I’m particularly excited about the first two. Get PowerToys here. It’s free. No ads. No annual fees. It really is free. If you already have PowerToys, to get the update, launch PowerToys from yourRead More →

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A colleague recently received a question bank from a publisher as a CSV (spreadsheet) file. He wondered how to get those questions into Canvas. It takes a few steps, but there is a way. For those of you hate all the clicking Canvas requires for you to create quiz questions, you will love this. This blog post from Kristina Wilson at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Distance Learning office will give you all of the instructions you need on how to use the Kansas State University’s CSV to QTI converter. Here is the short version. First, download the Kansas State template. Here areRead More →

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Zoom has released a new manual update. You can get it from their download center. There’s not much here that is especially exciting for instructors. Here are a few highlights. If you’d like the full list, visit Zoom’s release notes page. Hand gestures We can now quickly turn on/turn off gesture recognition. Click the new up arrow next to Reactions to toggle “Recognize hand gestures.” This is a welcome addition for those of you who have discovered that you wave your arms a lot when speaking. Apply video filters to future meetings Want to be a pirate by default when joining all future meetings? ApplyRead More →

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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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