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A number of my colleagues have recently acquired smartphones that run on Android. I promised them that I’d share my favorite apps. Some of them are even relevant to education. Andricious (free). As you may know, I’m a fan of Delicious, the social bookmarking service. Andricious gives me easy access to all of my Delicious bookmarks. When I use my phone’s web browser, I can also use Andricious to save pages to Delicious. (You may have heard a rumor that Delicious is shutting down. That’s not the case. A few years ago Yahoo bought Delicious and then did nothing with it. It looks like YahooRead More →

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Last month I wrote about BridgeURL, a service that lets you bundle links together into one URL. Controls appear on either side of your browser window that allow you to cycle through the links. Here’s an example of a BridgeURL link. For those of you who are fans of bit.ly, the URL shortener service, they’ve recently added the ability to bundle URLs together. Log in to your bit.ly account. Check the boxes next to the links you’d like to bundle together, and click ‘Bundle.’ Clicking ‘Bundle’ generates this page where you can add links to your newly created bundle. In this screenshot, you only seeRead More →

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RSS feeds are a great way to keep track of what’s new. I use Google Reader, but there are many other ways to read RSS feeds. You can even bring feeds into Outlook. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS feeds, start with this post about Google Reader. Here I’m going to talk about how you can push RSS feeds to your students via your website or CMS (e.g., Angel). This is from my personal web page. Everything in the box comes from the American Psychological Association (APA). Every time APA updates their news feed, the content in this box is updated. If you visit my websiteRead More →

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[Update 1/17/13: FollowUp.cc remains free for those who use up to 30 reminders a month.  For up to 100 reminders and integration with Google Calendar, you’ll need to sign up for their personal plan at $5/month.] A month ago I wrote about NudgeMail, a service that allows you to send email reminders to yourself in the future. For example, if you send an email to Monday@NudgeMail.com, you’ll receive that email back from NudgeMail on Monday morning. An email sent to 1pm@NudgeMail.com sends that email back to you the next time 1pm rolls around. An email sent to 5minutes@NudgeMail.com sends that email back to you inRead More →

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Want to give out your cell phone or home phone number to students but you don’t want them to have your phone number in perpetuity? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could, in effect, change your phone number every term? Check out Babble.ly. How it works You give students a randomly-generated URL or QR code to that URL. (If you’re unfamiliar with QR codes, start with this post.) That takes them to the website below. The student enters their phone number and name (optional). The student clicks ‘Call.’ Babble.ly will call the student’s phone. When the student answers, Babble.ly will call your phone. The studentRead More →

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Back in March, I wrote about QR codes. I just came across this document which offers some interesting ideas on how to use QR codes. It was written for a K-12 audience, but there are a bunch of ideas that are relevant to higher education. I learned a couple things I didn’t know. First, the size of the QR code is correlated with the size of the URL. Makes sense. I just didn’t know that. If you have a long URL but want a small QR code, use a URL shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl then create your QR code. Actually, bit.ly and goo.gl makeRead More →

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With the end of the term upon us, are you looking for a better way to detect plagiarism? We’ve probably all put a suspect passage into Google. If the quote is exact, the source is easy to find. But what if the student has changed a few words? Those are a little tougher. But here’s a little known tool that can help a lot. In Google, you can use the operator AROUND (must be in all capital letters) to find terms or phrases that are ‘around’ each other. Here’s an example. Original passage: “When you have PTSD, it can seem like you’ll never get overRead More →

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Here’s a quick tip for YouTube users. Let’s say that you’d like to show a YouTube video in class, live from the web. (See this post to learn how to download YouTube videos to your computer for viewing offline.) You link to it from your PowerPoint slide. Once your browser loads and the video begins to play, you remember that the first 5 minutes aren’t relevant to your lecture. You use the controls at the bottom of the video to advance to the spot. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just create a link to the YouTube video so that it would take youRead More →

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One of the nice things about living in a digital world is the amount of contact we can have with other people via email. Of course that’s one of the bad things about living in a digital world as well. How much of your work day is spent writing, reading, filing, deleting, or searching for email? In previous posts, I’ve suggested some tools that can help with this (see Subtextual, SimplyFile, Phrase Express, Xobni). In this post I want to talk about some of the built-in power that comes with Outlook. Specifically, I’m going to talk about how to set up rules so that atRead More →

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UPDATED 9/5/2011: Be sure to read a more recent post on this tool. Last month I wrote about a new service (YouCanBook.Me) that lets students schedule appointments with you themselves. (See the original blog post.) Now that I’ve been using it for a couple months, I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned. The booking form The default booking form asks those making an appointment with you to give you their email address (required) and leave a note (not required). I, however, want more information than that, and YouCanBook.Me gives me the power to ask for whatever I’d like. Specifically, I want the appointee’sRead More →

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