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 your Windows start menu, and on the PowerToys general tab click the “Check for updates” button.

Text extractor

This tool allows you to grab the text from anywhere on your screen. Yes, that also includes images. Use the keyboard shortcut to run the text extractor: Windows key + Shift + t (for text). Your screen will go gray. Click and drag your mouse to draw a rectangle around the text you want to capture. Unclick your mouse. Windows has captured the text from the image, and that text is now on clipboard ready for pasting.

For an example, let’s take this CDC infographic.

I’m going to run the text extractor on the infographic title and subtitle. I press windows key + shift + t. My screen turns gray, and I click and drag from the top left corner of the title to the bottom right corner of the subtitle. The content is quietly sent to my clipboard. When I paste it, I get this text:

ADDRESS IT TODAY. PREVENT IT TOMORROW.

We can reduce the generational impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), overdose, and suicide.

Pretty slick, eh?

Quick accent

I have a need to type accented letters often enough that I need a quick way to do it, but not often enough that I can remember how to do it. I confident this is going to solve it for me, because there is only keyboard combination I need to remember.

Quick accent is disabled by default. To enable it, launch PowerToys from your Windows start menu. Select “Quick Accent.” Next to “Enable Quick Accent,” flip the switch to the on position.

On your keyboard, press and hold the letter you want accented, then press and release the spacebar or left or right arrow keys. This will give you a toolbar of accents to choose from. Here, I pressed and held a, and then pressed and released the spacebar. I can then use my keyboard arrow keys to select the accent I want.

When you’ve selected the accent you want, release the letter key.

á

That’s worth going through one more time.

1. Press and hold letter key
2. Press and release spacebar, left arrow key, or right arrow key
3. Use arrow keys to select the accent
4. Release letter key

If you’re like me, you will discover that it’s not unusual to press a letter key at the end of a word while simultaneously pressing the spacebar to move onto the next word. For example, when typing “the,” if I press the e and press the spacebar at the same time, and then I release the e as I prepare to move on to the next word, I end up selecting the very first option in the toolbar, so what I actually type is “thé.” That’s great if I’m writing about French tea; it’s less great if I just want the mundane article “the.” Soon after I had quick accents up and running, I found myself making this error quite a bit. Hours later, the feedback has helped my brain adjust my typing to be more precise. I still make the error, but they are getting less frequent.

By default, the accent options toolbar appears in the top center of the screen. For some reason, I have a hard time finding it up there. In the quick accent section of PowerToys, I changed the location of the toolbar to bottom center. This seems to be a better spot for me. You do you.

Screen ruler

The last PowerToys tool in this update measures the number of pixels for objects on your screen. Windows key + Shift + M (for measuring) will cause the pixel measuring toolbar to appear in the top center of your screen.

Click the first icon—dashed square. Click and drag around an area you want to measure. Here you can see the red line that marks the area I’ve measured. The measurement of 333 pixels by 462 pixels appears in the bottom right corner. When you are done measuring, click the dashed square icon again.

For my purposes, that’s the only icon in the toolbar that I’m interested in. Try out the plus, the horizontal, and the vertical icons. Choose one, move your cursor around whatever is on your screen that you’d like to measure. The screen ruler will try its best to guess what you want measured.

When you’re done with the screen ruler, click the x at the end of the toolbar to close it.

Conclusion

That’s it for this round of PowerToys updates. Enjoy!

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 are their descriptions for each of the columns (see this page).

1. Column A is the type of question: MC (multiple choice) and MR (multiple response) are used in this example. [See template.]
   
2. Column B is not used but must be there.
   
3. Column C is the point value of the question. It can be between 0-100 and up to two decimal places (3.33)
   
4. Column D is question body. Q1 or similar if you don’t want to include the real question and have students see the questions online.
   
5. Column E is the correct answer. The number 1-5 each correspond to the one of the possible answers listed in column F-J. In the example file, we use 1 to indicate a, 2 to indicate b, 3 to indicate c, 4 to indicate d, and 5 to indicate. For True/False questions, use 1 for True and 0 for False.
   
6. Columns F-J are the possible answer choices. You can have 2 or more. [Add more if you need them. It should work.]
   

As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only question types available are multiple choice (MC) and multiple response (MR). If you’re able to determine that there are other question types that can be designated in column A, please let me know (sue@suefrantz.com). Thanks!

After you’ve entered your questions, save the file. This is what mine looks like.

Next, you’ll visit the Kansas State converter page. Click Browse to find the file you just saved with all of your questions in it, then click the Perform Conversion button. In your downloads folder, you’ll now have a zip file. Do not unzip it.

Last, go to your Canvas course. In course settings, click Import Course Content. From the Content Type menu, select the last option: QTI .zip file. The quiz questions will be available as a Classic Quiz, not New Quiz.

Happy quizzing!

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? Apply the video filter, and check the box next to “Apply to all future meetings.”

I can’t imagine this is a good idea, but you do you.

Breakout rooms

The release notes dated June 20, 2022 say that breakout rooms should now be searchable by participant name or by name of room. This change did not seem to make it into version 5.11.0. Or if it’s there, I don’t know how to use it.

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 it all seems so quaint now.

Library databases now come with an automated service that does the same thing. You can get an alert when new content in your favorite journals is published or you can get an alert based on a search term where the results can come from multiple sources. The alert can come to you through email or by RSS feed, whichever you prefer. (Read more about my favorite feed reader, Inoreader, in this 2018 blog post.) If you’d like to set up alerts through your library’s database, talk with your friendly neighborhood librarian. They’ll have you up and running in no time.

If you would like to cast a wider net than the journals listed in your library’s database, consider using the free service offered by JournalTOCs. “JournalTOCs is the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains articles’ metadata of TOCs for over 32,418 journals directly collected from over 3333 publishers.” The metadata is information about an article that the publisher attaches to it. Most commonly they attach bibliographic information, but many publishers also include abstracts.

Just like your library’s databases, you can create an alert for table of contents when new issues of your favorite journals are published, or you can create an alert based on a search term. Again, also like your library’s databases, you can get your alerts via email or via RSS feed.

Using JournalTOCs

Start by creating a JournalTOCs account.

Next, enter your search term. If you want to be alerted when a new table of contents is available for particular journals, search for journal titles under the Journals tab. If you want to be alerted every time an article about, say, the HEXACO model of personality is published, search for that term under the Articles tab.

Under journals I searched for Social Psychology. I’ve ticked the boxes for the journals whose table of contents I want to see when a new issue is published.

Now let’s set up the alerts. In the top right corner, mouse over your username, and select Followed Journals. At the bottom of your list of followed journals, tick the box for email alerts. Or if you’d rather get the RSS feed, click the Save & Export link to download the opml file. If you’re not sure what to do with the file, click the question mark next to Save & Export for some guidance.

Saving an article search is a little less intuitive. From the Articles tab on the home page, search for whatever you’d like. For each search you do, JournalTOCs is holding onto it.

When you’re ready to set up article alerts, mouse over your username in the top right corner, and select Saved Searches. Here you will see your searches for journals and articles. I want article alerts for HEXACO, so I’m going to click Save next to it.

Now that it’s saved, I click on Alert-me, and JournalTOCs will send me an email whenever HEXACO appears in a newly published article in one of the nearly 33,000 journals they are tracking. If I want to get this information in my feed reader, I’d click on the little orange icon next to Alert-me.

What an alert looks like in a feed reader

Two days ago, the European Journal of Social Psychology published a new issue. JournalTOCs dropped the table of contents into my feed reader. The first item is Issue Information. Clicking on it takes me to the publisher’s page for the issue. The next item is an article listed in this issue’s table of contents. JournalTOCs gave me the article title, the journal name, the authors, and the abstract. Scrolling down on this page will show me the rest of the articles in this issue.

That’s it!

Choose whatever journals you’d like. Choose whatever search terms you’d like. If you change your mind, come back to JournalTOCs, mouse over your name, click on your saved searches and edit away.

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 Canvas dashboard. If you have courses not on your dashboard that you want to assign nicknames to, go to your full list of courses, and click on the star for each course you want to nickname. Once the star is gold, you’ll find the course on your dashboard. After you’ve added nicknames, return to your full list of courses and click on the stars. Once the stars are no longer gold, you won’t see them on your dashboard, but the nicknames will still be there.

On the course card, click the 3-dot kabob menu icon. In the nickname field, enter a nickname for the course. This will be your “folder” name. For every course that you want in the same “folder,” enter the same nickname. Click the Apply button. You will now see the nickname directly above your official course name on the course card.

All Courses Sort Tampermonkey script

If you have not yet installed Tampermonkey, read this earlier blog post for information on what Tampermonkey does. Pay special attention to the part about changing the script code if your Canvas url does not have the word “instructure” in the address.

After you have Tampermonkey installed, visit this webpage to install James Jones’s awesome All Courses Sort script.

Once installed and running, on your Canvas course list page, you will have search boxes for each column. Handy, but not why we’re here. It is not obvious, but each column header is now clickable. Click on Nickname, and your courses will be sorted by nickname in alphabetical order. Click again, and the order will be reversed.

Be aware that you have separate course lists on your full course list page. The top part will be all current enrollments, then past enrollments, then future enrollments, then “My Groups” (if you have any groups). Canvas treats each course list as a separate entity, so each list will be sorted separately.

Happy sorting!

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.

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, the only one I can think of right now is Zoom’s release notes, although Canvas release notes might be handy. There are a lot of webpage monitors out there. Most operate on the freemium model. They give you limited functionality for free. If you’d like more, you’ll need to pay a monthly fee. It’s not a bad way to do things. “Try us out. If you find what we offer useful, pay for more.”

Let’s try out distill.io. In their free version, they’ll monitor five webpages for us using their own servers (“cloud monitor”) or we can install their browser add-on and use our own computer to monitor up to 25 webpages (“local monitor”). This page describes the difference. Let’s try out the “local monitor” that uses a browser add-on; the “local monitor” will only run when your browser is open. They have extensions for Firefox (here), Chrome (here), and Opera (here). You do you. [At some point, distill.io will ask you to create an account. Go ahead and do that. They will not ask you for a credit card.]

Once the browser extension is installed, you’ll see the distill.io water droplet icon in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s solid gray like it is here, it’s not monitoring any webpages.

Visit a webpage you’d like to monitor, such as the Zoom release notes page. Click the distill.io droplet icon in your browser. In the popup, click “Select parts of page.”

The popup will disappear and a yellow note will appear at the top of the page assuring you that the “selector” is on and that you can click on an element. An element is just about anything on a webpage. In the case of the Zoom release notes pages, they have a “Last Updated” element, so I’m going to ask distill.io to monitor that. Distill.io will let me know if anything in that area changes. After clicking on the element you want, in the bottom right corner click “Save selection.”

Distill.io will then take you to their website, where you’ll get to make some decisions. At the top of the page, note the red warning. When you’re ready for the distill.io browser add-on to start monitoring your selected webpages, click on the distill.io water droplet icon, and click “ON”. But let’s make some changes first. Next to “Schedule checks,” move the slider to the interval you want. It defaults to some number of hours, but move the slider to whatever you’d like. You can go up to 29 days, and then never. I’m not sure why you’d select never, but you can if you’d like. Next, in the “Actions” section, you’ll tell distill.io how you’d like to be notified of any changes. Click the trashcan next to things you don’t want. I don’t want an audio notification, but I’ll take the popup and an email. Click “Add action” to see other ways to be notified. The actions with an asterisk are available only for paid subscribers. When you’re happy with your changes, click the blue “Save” button.

On your distill.io “Watchlist” page, you’ll see the page being monitored, the content being monitored, how often distill.io is checking on it (1 day), when a change was last detected (1:21pm today, when I set up monitoring), the computer monitor icon means it’s set up as a local monitor, and the green “ON” tells us distill.io is monitoring it. If you ever want to delete it, click the check box, and you’ll get a toolbar that includes a trashcan icon; click to delete.

Any time you want to pop into your Watchlist, click the distill.io droplet icon in the top right corner of your browser, and click “Go to Watchlist.”

That’s it! Now we sit and wait for Zoom to update their updates page.

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 to add a little something to their portfolio so that they can get their dream job at Crayola.

Or you can color code by mood. Do you have a folder for a committee or a project you are just not leaping up and down about? Perhaps “earthworm” would be a good folder color match for your feelings.

Go to https://drive.google.com. Right-click on a folder. Mouse over “Change color,” select a color from the palette. If you hover over the color for a second, the color name will appear. After mousing over all the colors, send me your favorite color name.

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 with their Google Calendar, keep these tentative meetings from synching to Google Calendar.

Important caveat: If the person who sent the meeting invitation included a reminder notification, you will still see the notification pop-up for the tentative meeting. One solution? Every Monday morning, pop into your calendar, right-click on each tentative meeting and select “Decline” or “Delete.” If you’ve hidden all of the tentative meetings from view (see below), on the View tab, click the Reset View button. After declining or deleting them all, if you want to hide all new tentative meetings from view again you’ll have to create a new filter.

Doesn’t it feel like it should be way easier than this? Since it’s not, let’s get to it.

Delete the meeting invitation on arrival: Desktop Outlook

To autodelete specific meeting invitations, we need to set up an Outlook rule. We can set up a rule without having the meeting invitation, but since you’re more likely to be motivated to do something about unwanted meeting invitations when they arrive, we’ll build the rule from here.

Right-click on the meeting invitation. From the menu, mouse over Rules, then select Create Rule.

In the rule pop-up, Outlook takes some guesses as to what rule we want to create. In this case, Outlook guessed wrong. Click the Advanced Options button to get to the options we want.

I’m going to create a rule that will apply to meeting invitations from a specific person. In the Rules Wizard pop-up, check the box next to the name of the person, then scroll down and check the box next to “which is a meeting invitation or update.” Remember, I don’t want to delete every message from them, just their meeting invitations. Click Next.

Now we’ll tell Outlook to take the meeting invitations from that person and delete them. Check the box next to “delete it.” Click Next.

In the next pop-up window, choose any exceptions you’d like to make, if any, then click Next. On the last screen, give your rule a name. Check the box next to “Run this rule now…” Make sure the next box is checked: “Turn on this rule.” Click the Finish button.

If you’d like to delete or make any changes to your rule, on the Outlook Home ribbon, click on Rules and then Manage Rules & Alerts. Double-click on the rule you’d like to change, and you’ll see the now-familiar Rules Wizard. Make whatever changes you’d like. Clicking the Finish button will save them.

Delete the meeting invitation on arrival: Web Outlook (Office 365)

If you use both Outlook for the web and desktop outlook, rules created in one version will automatically work in the other. These instructions are for those who may only use Outlook for the web.

Right-click on the meeting invitation, mouse over “Advanced actions,” select “Create rule.”

In the pop-up, click the “More options” link.

Change the name of the rule to something like “For meeting invitations from M.” Click “Add another condition.” From the menu, in the “Message includes” section, select “Type.” Now, to the right of “Type,” you are asked to “Select an option.” Click in that box, and select “Invitation.” Under “Add an action,” select “Delete.” Check the box next to “Run rule now.” Click the “Save” button.

Hide the unaccepted/undeclined meeting invitation from calendar: Desktop Outlook

Even though the meeting invitations that meet the criteria we outlined in our rule are automatically deleted, Outlook calendar still adds them to our calendar as a “Tentative” meeting.

In my mind, it’s not tentative at all. Really, I am not going to attend this meeting. In an ideal world, Outlook would let me delete these calendar additions when I created the rule. I’d even be happy if Outlook let me create a new rule that would do it. But, alas, it is not to be. At least not as of this writing, so we will do the next best thing. We’re going to hide all “tentative” meetings from view. If you leave “tentative” meetings in your Outlook calendar because you use them somehow, do not follow these instructions. Also, be aware that this meeting time will still be blocked off on your calendar. Anyone who is looking for a time to meet with you, your hidden “tentative” meeting times will show as unavailable.

To hide tentative meetings from your Outlook calendar, go to the View ribbon, click on View Settings. In the pop-up, click the Filter button, then on the Advanced tab click on the Field button.

Next, click the Field button, select “All Appointment fields,” then “Meeting Status.” (Whew!)

One last step. Change “Condition” to “not equal to,” and change “Value” to “Not yet responded.” Click OK, and say OK to whatever additional pop-ups Outlook throws at you.

That is it! Your desktop Outlook calendar will show you everything on your calendar except those meeting invitations that you have not responded to.

Again, hiding your tentative meetings from view will not stop the reminder notifications. One option discussed above is to remove the view filter at the beginning of your work week, click and delete each tentative appointment on your calendar, and then apply the filter again. At least that way you’re only dealing with tentative messages once a week instead of dealing with them every time they arrive.

Hide the unaccepted/undeclined meeting invitation from calendar: Web Outlook (Office 365)

Unfortunately, it cannot be done. Not only can you not hide tentative meetings in your web Outlook calendar, the hidden tentative meetings we created in desktop Outlook only apply to desktop Outlook. They do not carry over to web Outlook. More info here. I’m sorry!

Google calendar users: Keep tentative meetings from synching

While I use Outlook calendar for work, I use Google calendar for my personal use. To minimize confusion, I sync these two calendars using the aptly named Outlook Google Calendar Sync. (On their website, do not click any giant start buttons on the screen. Those are ads. Instead, under “Alpha, click the blue Setup.Exe button.

By default, all of those tentative meetings we’ve hidden in Outlook calendar will sync to Google Calendar. Since I’m (still!) not going to those meetings, they don’t need to be on my Google Calendar, either.

In the Outlook Google Calendar Sync settings, on the Outlook tab, check the box next to “Only sync invites I’ve responded to.” Done! All of those hidden tentative meetings will now no long show on my Google Calendar. (To the good people at Microsoft who work on the Outlook teams, please give us a checkbox like this. Thanks!)

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 as you score the assignment, click the other rubric cells as needed. Or 2) Click the other rubric cells as you score, leaving the max scores blank. When you are done scoring, click the Max button. The scores you entered will not change; only the criteria with nothing selected will have max points selected.

Installing the script

You have Tampermonkey installed, yes? If not, install it.

Next, install the script by clicking here.

Log into Canvas. Look at the url. If it starts with <something>.instructure.com, you should be good to go. If it starts with anything else, say, canvas.<something>.edu, then we need to make a little change to the code.

In the top right corner of your browser, click on the Tampermonkey icon, black square with two white circles.

From the menu, select Dashboard. On the Tampermonkey dashboard, select “Rubric Max Ratings.” If this is your first Tampermonkey script, this will be the only one on your dashboard.

After selecting it, you will see the code. In line 6, the code says it will only run on instructure.com pages. Since we need it to run on canvas.<something>.edu pages, we need to add line 6 highlighted below: // @include https://canvas.*.edu/courses/*/gradebook/speed_grader?* then save by clicking FileàSave.

Important cautionary note: Clicking on the little yellow icon next to line 7 tells us that @include is going away in 2023 and that we should use @match instead. For reasons I don’t (yet!) understand, @match does not work for me, but @include does. [If you know why @include does not work for me, please email me at sue@suefrantz.com. Thanks!]

Now, go to Speedgrader and enjoy your new Max button. While you’re there, take a look at the Tampermonkey icon in the top right of your browser. It will now have a 1 on it to confirm that one Tampermonkey script is running on the page.